ABSTRACT
The power of the present emphasis on phonological learning comes in part from the highly researched understanding that phonological difficulty or deficit is a core feature of reading disability or dyslexia, especially in the English language. While vowel combinations may have different pronunciations, for young children the focus is on two aspects: the long sound and the short sound. The written forms of speech sounds are known as graphemes; Moats identifies over 250 graphemes in the English language, some of them having more than one pronunciation. There is not a complete one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, especially if a child is not secure in his or her phonemic knowledge. Of more concern for children with potential or actual dyslexia is the matter of letter confusion or reversal. This has been perceived commonly as a characteristic of dyslexia; it is a characteristic of delayed development of writing, consistent with a developmental view of dyslexia.
