ABSTRACT
Learning to read means learning to get sense from the marks on the page. With an alphabetic writing system such as ours, it is tempting to equate the whole process with phonics learning: learning to match the written letters on the page to the spoken sounds they represent. So, when public anxiety about children’s reading scores reaches a panic level – an increasingly frequent occurrence as we move to ever greater dependence on the written word – any ‘expert’ purveying a simple phonic nostrum is likely to get a good hearing. In 1955 Rudolph Flesch took the US by storm with Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can Do About It, which stayed in the best seller lists for 30 weeks and was serialised in countless newspapers (Flesch, 1955). Last year Diane McGuinness published Why Children Can’t Read and What We Can Do About It, which hit a similar spot and led to a host of articles in newspapers and appearances on radio talk shows on both sides of the Atlantic (McGuinness, 1998). We also have our own Ruth Miskin, whose insistence on a simple phonic approach has led her to refuse to commit her school to the National Literacy Strategy. All purvey a straightforward ‘commonsense’ approach (although McGuinness dresses this up with some rather tendentious linguistics). This starts from the premise that learning to read is a matter of learning to match individual phonemes (speech sounds) to individual graphemes (letters or letter combinations such as ‘th’ or ‘ea’).
