ABSTRACT
An experienced reader, when sharing a text with a beginner, must exercise judgement as to how to break the word up to be of most help – syllabically; by onset and rime; or phoneme by phoneme. Only for some of the time will this last option be the same as letter by letter. One of the great difficulties of reading and spelling English words is that though there are 44 sounds or phonemes, there are only 26 letters of the alphabet. It is obvious then that there can be no straightforward, oneto-one correspondence between sounds and letters.
