The linguistic base of initial reading and spelling in English: a tutorial review

Where should phonics teaching start? ‘satpin’ and its origins, rivals and implications

“…When these data are available, they may suggest revised orders for teaching initial correspondences and therefore imply a need for some updating of schemes that put phoneme frequencies, and their usefulness, at the heart of their rationale, sequencing and pedagogy. Meanwhile, the most scientifically based available analyses for British English are those contained in Solity and Vousden (2009) and Brooks (2015Brooks ( , 2021 None of the analysis reported here applies to initial teaching or intervention schemes that are not based on phonics. The authors of schemes which are phonics-based have adopted a variety of starting points and rationales for them, mainly intended to give children early experience of words they know and therefore of creating meaning from text and creating meaning in text-which is after all the point.…”

“…When these data are available, they may suggest revised orders for teaching initial correspondences and therefore imply a need for some updating of schemes that put phoneme frequencies, and their usefulness, at the heart of their rationale, sequencing and pedagogy. Meanwhile, the most scientifically based available analyses for British English are those contained in Solity and Vousden (2009) and Brooks (2015, 2021)…”

“…They amassed a large database of children's early reading books, logged all the vocabulary used in them, and analysed the frequency and utility of the grapheme–phoneme correspondences the words contained. The results suggested that a list of 77 graphemes (conveniently tabulated, with a few small errors amended, in Brooks, 2021: 15) and their major correspondences (plus what Solity & Vousden, 2009: 496 call ‘a core sight vocabulary of 100 words’) would be close to an optimum set for teaching children, in the sense that they cover a very large percentage of what children are likely to encounter in their early reading books. However, there is a risk of circularity here, of endlessly recycling the same restricted set of words because they appear in existing early reading books and reducing innovation; for example, a dataset based on phonic readers alone might bias frequency information.…”

“…For a key to the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols used in this article see again Brooks (2021). Phonemes are enclosed in double forward slashes, / /, and graphemes in paired angle brackets, < >.…”

“…The latter need a rapid induction into literacy, which most often will include systematic phonics within a rich and broad language and literacy curriculum. The average English-speaking 5-year-old's vocabulary is estimated (see Brooks, 2021 and references there) to contain about 2500 word families, where for present purposes a word family is defined as comprising a root word and all its inflected and derived forms, e.g. work, works, working, worked, worker, rework, etc. (and not the alternative sense of a set of words with a common sound and spelling pattern).…”