Reading Simplified is an excellent program that doesn't dwell on teaching kids rules. It's one of several excellent Speech-to-Print programs. I truly wish these programs would become the norm in school. I also wish they would gain (or exceed) the status of Orton-Gillingham for kids who struggle with reading, including dyslexic kids. They have more evidence behind them.
I agree. In case anyone reading this is interested, I wrote an article outlining the similarities and differences. I include some discussion of how the speech-to-print linguistic phonics approach facilitates statistical learning and includes a focus on set for variability and application to text.
Rather than talking about the "amount" of phonics instruction defined broadly, I think a more helpful framing would be in terms of differences among approaches to teaching phonics. There are many. It's more about "how" than "how much", but I agree we need far more attention to efficiency.
Great recommendation, Miriam. Here's a complete list of his 2021 Conversations Bridging Science and Practice, originally over Zoom, now available as podcasts. Excellent discussions with knowledgeable researchers and practitioners.
Reading Mastery is, for me the standard-bearer in rational classroom reading instruction. Considering that there are a number of canned programs that have proven track records of astounding success, and that all that our public schools would need to do in order to succeed is to have their teachers follow a "recipe" of sorts, isn't it a wonder that the typical elementary school can't seem to produce competent readers? http://mychildwillread.org/
"While schools may have been overdoing decoding instruction in the early grades, there usually isn’t enough support for word-reading skills at higher grade levels, where intervention is likely to focus only on comprehension. When older students do get decoding-focused help, it’s generally aimed at simple, one-syllable words rather than the complex, multisyllablic words that are causing students trouble."
This is such an important piece, Natalie--thank you! I recommend the free online program Word Connections to address decoding instruction in the upper grades.
"While decoding instruction tends to be reduced in the upper elementary grades, text is becoming more complex and the number of multisyllabic words that students encounter increase dramatically in third grade and beyond. Students who experience reading challenges often lack a systematic approach for decoding these words.
Word Connections is a supplemental reading intervention program. It includes 40 lessons (40 min each), divided into four units of instruction. Word Connections was developed for students in third grade and above who continue to experience challenges with word reading even though they have developed foundational decoding skills. The lessons focus on promoting automaticity with reading “big words.” This approach to multisyllabic word reading integrates multiple opportunities for students to manipulate and read words, rather than focusing on rule-based instruction."
Most phonics programs wait much too long to explicitly teach kids to read long words, and when they do, they include syllable "types" and cumbersome syllable division rules that don't even work at least half the time and significantly increase cognitive load. Then you end up needing an intervention in 3rd grade. Sigh.
Thank you, Harriet, for this resource. I am a language learning therapist dual certified as SLP & learning - working primarily with late elementary & middle schoolers & could not agree more! I struggle to find resources with multisyllabic academic language words for this age/grade group.
School systems generally go overboard once they think they’ve found a “fix” for a problem. I wrote about McGuffey Readers in this week’s post. McGuffey Readers effectively taught several generations how to read and write. Why not go back to that method?
I have used phonics in classes in Asia, teaching kids and young students whose second language is English.
In that sense, it really does help them to be able to join all the parts together and see clarity between certain letters and how they are read and sounded out when reading out loud.
From this perspective, I have found using phonics very useful in the class.
But I also exercise a great deal of common sense. There is no need to labour the point over one tiny phoneme if it is only used in a handful of words.
Also, as you said above, even for kids whose second language is English, they can kind of join the dots by themselves after a while and they are able to see how the letters and sounds all join up.
Not all students. But a fair number can do this.
That said, I am under the impression that in America, many schools teach whole word reading. I don't really see how this can benefit the student at all. I imagine this can lead to some confusion.
This is where phonics could really help. But the teacher just needs to engage judicious use of this in the class.
I am not surprised that the pendulum has swung so far in the "other" direction in the "Reading Wars." We have parents suing education leaders and teachers "scared" they are doing it wrong. The folks who started the "Science of Reading" movement and have fanned the flames of the "Reading Wars" are partly to blame and are now backpedaling and saying teachers are spending too much time on it and that building background knowledge is important for comprehension. As a 35-year veteran teacher, I KNOW how to teach reading, and I am comfortable applying tried and true strategies with my students. But I worry for our younger teachers. They are not being given time to fill their "tool kit" with what works. What works one year or for one child doesn't necessarily work the next year. In my opinion, what needs to happen, is strong professional development and the necessary resources for success, including instructional coaches who can help newer teachers understand how to move forward when instruction is working and how to pivot when it is not. We aren't teaching "the program." We are teaching the students.
Hi - extremely interesting article. I think I would have wholeheartedly agreed with it a couple of years ago but I have moved slightly in the opposite direction in leaning towards more rather than less phonics even with competent readers. The reason being that my experience is that competent readers with weak phonic skills are also terrible spellers! Teaching some of the more infrequent sound-spelling correspondences really helps with spelling and more fundamentally with the idea that spelling is about breaking words down into their sounds and thinking about how they could be spelled rather than trying to rote-learn. It then feeds beneficially into writing - I would try to combine phonics with sentence work for these learners.
Also very interested in the issue of oral reading fluency and its relationship to comprehension. I am aware of the correlation between the two but haven't seen any "Some evidence indicates that oral practice helps students read more quickly without boosting their comprehension". If you or others could possibly point me in that direction, I would be really grateful!
There's some discussion of the trade-off between oral reading speed and comprehension in this article by Hiebert and Daniel : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329426237_Comprehension_and_rate_during_silent_reading_Why_do_some_students_do_poorly ("Those who didn’t understand simpler texts read more complex texts faster and with poorer comprehension, but both effects were small."). The authors suggest that less proficient readers sometimes make a trade off between speed and comprehension, so encouraging speed can be detrimental to comprehension.
I came across a similar finding in another study, but I can't put my hands on it at the moment. If I find it I'll let you know!
As an English teacher in the UK, I'm amazed that any school would countenance spending a two-hour literacy block on phonics teaching. There lies madness indeed!
In the view of many phonics teachers in the England (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland follow different approaches), about half-an-hour a day of phonics teaching in the first three years of schooling is about as much as is necessary. The rest of the time can then be spent on writing, teaching handwriting, reading stories, and informational texts.
I agree with Marnie Ginsberg of Reading Simplified and Norah Chahbadzi inasmuch as a speech-to-print approach to the teaching of reading and spelling would greatly simplify learning. Teaching the code and all the rules so many phonics proponents insist on is a huge waste of cognitive resources. Kids can't remember rules, much less apply them and all their exceptions. For example, coding the word 'seize' as the pattern ei-e would seem to be less efficient than teaching the sound /ee/ as < ei > and the sound /z/ as < ze >. The spelling < ei > is far less common than < ee >, < ea > or < e >, it's true, but < ze > is relatively common in words like 'breeze' and 'freeze'.
Considering that there is a single book that allows any reasonably literate person to become a better reading instructor than 99% of the nation's professional teachers, this whole ongoing issue simply floors me. Yes you need to teach basic phonics. Once the student is reasonably fluent, he/she will get the idea and figure out the additional details for him or herself. The book has been around for decades and much if not most of the entire home-schooling community uses it: http://mychildwillread.org/
I guess I'm at a loss here. If public schools are now overdoing phonics instruction, why are the states implementing LETRS, a teacher-training program designed to expose existing teachers to the seemingly radical notion of teaching phonics? After collectively spending billions producing each new annual crop of teacher's-college graduates, why to the states have to allocate this comparative pittance to re-educate those same teachers in the apparently foreign idea that alphabetic languages somehow represent spoken sounds? Why does Education Week feel compelled to write articles like this one, which takes pains to explain to its teacher audience that word recognition involves making letter-sound associations? Why does Louisa Moats, one of the creators of LETRs, feel that someone must “give people a knowledge base for doing the job”, where the "people" in question are teachers who've spent four or maybe six years in college apparently not having that knowledge base??? https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/letrs-program-teacher-training
Our national attitude towards teachers is one of dismissive superiority. Even those who purport to respect the profession feel the need to tell us how to do our jobs. 🤷
I don't dismissively look down on teachers. Rather I recognize that impressionable college students will tend to believe whatever they are taught by those who they perceive to be experts. I am not questioning the validity of LETRS here; I am questioning why, after four or six years in teachers' college, teachers cannot produce competent readers.
I don't think all research is dismissive of teachers, I do think the question is not "Why can't teachers produce competent readers?" but something more along the lines of "What factors are affecting literacy in US classrooms?"
When you start with classroom instruction you are starting pretty far downstream in the learning process. If the river is polluted asking the fisherman to change their casting method every few years is unlikely to produce results. It does, however, keep the focus away from other factors affecting the catch.
Excellent food for thought. Four years in to the laudable Science of Reading iniative (that is, when the research is in the limelight), and I think it's such a crucial time for some of the prominent voices and experts on teaching reading to articulate the nuances needed to help develop proficient engaged, readers. Honestly, I think the field of education keeps falling into the same trap because some mysterious stridency and group-think ascends. The educational publishing companies and their products are only as good as the researchers and practitioners conceptualizing the programs and advising them. Why is it that this "gone overboard" occurs? We will do right by kids when we take an honest look at the human dynamics of it all. There are hundreds of books, podcasts, resources, articles in the last few years that do an excellent job of describing science-based phonics/ early reading practices and the need for explicit, systematic instruction, and so on. But crucially-- why are so, so many conversations in print and podcast devoid of HOW phonics buddies up to writing, how read alouds are powerful, ways in which teachers can be SoR aligned and still be champions of trade books in the classroom, independent reading once kids get to that point. What do SoR leaders say about amazing phonics instruction AND the power of one-on-one moments with a learner? Let's describe science of reading aligned instruction more fully in the context of each grade-level classroom, so teachers can feel assured about all the other sound literacy practices that thrive along with it. The radio silence on the role of text sets, trade books, classroom libraries, early writing, poetry, shared reading and other practices is odd, and it leads to kids being cheated out of a literacy environment they deserve. Are SoR notables too afraid to say the wrong thing?
Well put. I have taught children with O-G tools and methods with great success. However, difficulties ensue when these sane students face unfamiliar text. It requires a studious attempt by the teacher or tutor to prepare the student for the upcoming challenges.
A lot of excellent points here. I have also been having a lot of discussions lately, with colleagues and friends with young children, about whether the over-prescription of teaching phonics is killing a love of reading. The groan when the reading books comes out of the bag and the cries of, "I don't want to do phonics now, Mummy!" It is almost that this association with the difficulty of mastering some of the sounds creates a fear of enjoying a good story - which absolutely can go beyond the words decoded on a page. I would love to hear any further thoughts on this from the Substack community.
I think a lot of the fire and friction can be taken out of the debate by distinguishing between decoding and reading.
Phonics helps children to be skilful and fluent decoders. Decoding is *part* of what makes a reader, but a child who can accurately decode the written words and recognise the sounds they make is not a complete reader. Phonics is not 'reading' in its entirety.
A child who can decode well may be a good reader, or they may not be. But all children who are good readers can decode well.
Where schools and educators understand this distinction, they can maintain fidelity to a clear systematic phonics approach, without losing sight of what else matters in developing the other interwoven components of being a reader - comprehension, inference, vocabulary, personal response, intertextual connections, the interconnections between reading, writing, listening and speaking, and so on.
To me, the process of developing a child as a reader should include phonics. The school in which I trained and first taught has 96%+ of students using English as an additional language, and the well-delivered phonics approach - short, snappy daily sessions of around 20-30mins - means most children are effective decoders of English by the age of 7.
I do feel that having fully decodable readers is an important part of this process too. I say this with a declaration of interest that writing these books is part of my livelihood, but also that my belief in them as a pedagogical tool comes from my continued teaching experience.
For children to be able to read a whole book independently, because it is precisely matched to their phonics decoding, gives children a sense of self-efficacy, agency and motivation which can then continue to propel and motivate them as they progress towards (what are commonly and a little harshly referred to as) 'real books'.
All the while, whilst they are doing their phonics-grounded learning, they are also accessing storytelling sessions, being read to, they are co-reading picturebooks that they cannot read independently.
If school curricula are mindful of the centrality of developing children as readers, they clear a path so that the right amount of time is given to different elements of reading - phonics, read-aloud, picturebooks, 1:1 shared reading, contingent talk around a book.
The percentage of my (teenaged) students who actively hate reading and will only read when threatened has steadily grown over the twenty years I have been a teacher. I truly believe that the emphasis on "reading at grade level" is harmful, students develop reading skills at vastly different rates and no prescribed curriculum will change that. The tighter your grasp, the more that slip through your fingers.
Reading Simplified is an excellent program that doesn't dwell on teaching kids rules. It's one of several excellent Speech-to-Print programs. I truly wish these programs would become the norm in school. I also wish they would gain (or exceed) the status of Orton-Gillingham for kids who struggle with reading, including dyslexic kids. They have more evidence behind them.
I agree. In case anyone reading this is interested, I wrote an article outlining the similarities and differences. I include some discussion of how the speech-to-print linguistic phonics approach facilitates statistical learning and includes a focus on set for variability and application to text.
https://www.aetonline.org/resources/trending-news/148-aet-journal-article-getting-a-lot-of-attention
Rather than talking about the "amount" of phonics instruction defined broadly, I think a more helpful framing would be in terms of differences among approaches to teaching phonics. There are many. It's more about "how" than "how much", but I agree we need far more attention to efficiency.
Mark Seidenberg had a great conversation with Marnie Ginsberg of Reading SImplified on issues of instructional efficiency. You can listen here:
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/readingmeetings/episodes/Meeting-7-Reading-Simplified-and-Issues-of-Instructional-Efficiency-e10a64g
Great recommendation, Miriam. Here's a complete list of his 2021 Conversations Bridging Science and Practice, originally over Zoom, now available as podcasts. Excellent discussions with knowledgeable researchers and practitioners.
https://seidenbergreading.net/zoom/
Reading Mastery is, for me the standard-bearer in rational classroom reading instruction. Considering that there are a number of canned programs that have proven track records of astounding success, and that all that our public schools would need to do in order to succeed is to have their teachers follow a "recipe" of sorts, isn't it a wonder that the typical elementary school can't seem to produce competent readers? http://mychildwillread.org/
"While schools may have been overdoing decoding instruction in the early grades, there usually isn’t enough support for word-reading skills at higher grade levels, where intervention is likely to focus only on comprehension. When older students do get decoding-focused help, it’s generally aimed at simple, one-syllable words rather than the complex, multisyllablic words that are causing students trouble."
This is such an important piece, Natalie--thank you! I recommend the free online program Word Connections to address decoding instruction in the upper grades.
"While decoding instruction tends to be reduced in the upper elementary grades, text is becoming more complex and the number of multisyllabic words that students encounter increase dramatically in third grade and beyond. Students who experience reading challenges often lack a systematic approach for decoding these words.
Word Connections is a supplemental reading intervention program. It includes 40 lessons (40 min each), divided into four units of instruction. Word Connections was developed for students in third grade and above who continue to experience challenges with word reading even though they have developed foundational decoding skills. The lessons focus on promoting automaticity with reading “big words.” This approach to multisyllabic word reading integrates multiple opportunities for students to manipulate and read words, rather than focusing on rule-based instruction."
https://www.jessicatoste.com/wordconnections
Most phonics programs wait much too long to explicitly teach kids to read long words, and when they do, they include syllable "types" and cumbersome syllable division rules that don't even work at least half the time and significantly increase cognitive load. Then you end up needing an intervention in 3rd grade. Sigh.
Thank you, Harriet, for this resource. I am a language learning therapist dual certified as SLP & learning - working primarily with late elementary & middle schoolers & could not agree more! I struggle to find resources with multisyllabic academic language words for this age/grade group.
School systems generally go overboard once they think they’ve found a “fix” for a problem. I wrote about McGuffey Readers in this week’s post. McGuffey Readers effectively taught several generations how to read and write. Why not go back to that method?
https://collettegreystone.substack.com/p/the-forever-gift-ii-teach-reading
They stopped doing phonics for so long… and now it’s being done too much?
I have used phonics in classes in Asia, teaching kids and young students whose second language is English.
In that sense, it really does help them to be able to join all the parts together and see clarity between certain letters and how they are read and sounded out when reading out loud.
From this perspective, I have found using phonics very useful in the class.
But I also exercise a great deal of common sense. There is no need to labour the point over one tiny phoneme if it is only used in a handful of words.
Also, as you said above, even for kids whose second language is English, they can kind of join the dots by themselves after a while and they are able to see how the letters and sounds all join up.
Not all students. But a fair number can do this.
That said, I am under the impression that in America, many schools teach whole word reading. I don't really see how this can benefit the student at all. I imagine this can lead to some confusion.
This is where phonics could really help. But the teacher just needs to engage judicious use of this in the class.
Thanks for your article. Great points you made.
I am not surprised that the pendulum has swung so far in the "other" direction in the "Reading Wars." We have parents suing education leaders and teachers "scared" they are doing it wrong. The folks who started the "Science of Reading" movement and have fanned the flames of the "Reading Wars" are partly to blame and are now backpedaling and saying teachers are spending too much time on it and that building background knowledge is important for comprehension. As a 35-year veteran teacher, I KNOW how to teach reading, and I am comfortable applying tried and true strategies with my students. But I worry for our younger teachers. They are not being given time to fill their "tool kit" with what works. What works one year or for one child doesn't necessarily work the next year. In my opinion, what needs to happen, is strong professional development and the necessary resources for success, including instructional coaches who can help newer teachers understand how to move forward when instruction is working and how to pivot when it is not. We aren't teaching "the program." We are teaching the students.
The "Science of Reading" has always been a narrow view of reading/literacy. Let me know what you think: https://medium.com/@max_14203/my-own-science-of-reading-0d29ec228056
Hi - extremely interesting article. I think I would have wholeheartedly agreed with it a couple of years ago but I have moved slightly in the opposite direction in leaning towards more rather than less phonics even with competent readers. The reason being that my experience is that competent readers with weak phonic skills are also terrible spellers! Teaching some of the more infrequent sound-spelling correspondences really helps with spelling and more fundamentally with the idea that spelling is about breaking words down into their sounds and thinking about how they could be spelled rather than trying to rote-learn. It then feeds beneficially into writing - I would try to combine phonics with sentence work for these learners.
Also very interested in the issue of oral reading fluency and its relationship to comprehension. I am aware of the correlation between the two but haven't seen any "Some evidence indicates that oral practice helps students read more quickly without boosting their comprehension". If you or others could possibly point me in that direction, I would be really grateful!
There's some discussion of the trade-off between oral reading speed and comprehension in this article by Hiebert and Daniel : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329426237_Comprehension_and_rate_during_silent_reading_Why_do_some_students_do_poorly ("Those who didn’t understand simpler texts read more complex texts faster and with poorer comprehension, but both effects were small."). The authors suggest that less proficient readers sometimes make a trade off between speed and comprehension, so encouraging speed can be detrimental to comprehension.
I came across a similar finding in another study, but I can't put my hands on it at the moment. If I find it I'll let you know!
As an English teacher in the UK, I'm amazed that any school would countenance spending a two-hour literacy block on phonics teaching. There lies madness indeed!
In the view of many phonics teachers in the England (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland follow different approaches), about half-an-hour a day of phonics teaching in the first three years of schooling is about as much as is necessary. The rest of the time can then be spent on writing, teaching handwriting, reading stories, and informational texts.
I agree with Marnie Ginsberg of Reading Simplified and Norah Chahbadzi inasmuch as a speech-to-print approach to the teaching of reading and spelling would greatly simplify learning. Teaching the code and all the rules so many phonics proponents insist on is a huge waste of cognitive resources. Kids can't remember rules, much less apply them and all their exceptions. For example, coding the word 'seize' as the pattern ei-e would seem to be less efficient than teaching the sound /ee/ as < ei > and the sound /z/ as < ze >. The spelling < ei > is far less common than < ee >, < ea > or < e >, it's true, but < ze > is relatively common in words like 'breeze' and 'freeze'.
Considering that there is a single book that allows any reasonably literate person to become a better reading instructor than 99% of the nation's professional teachers, this whole ongoing issue simply floors me. Yes you need to teach basic phonics. Once the student is reasonably fluent, he/she will get the idea and figure out the additional details for him or herself. The book has been around for decades and much if not most of the entire home-schooling community uses it: http://mychildwillread.org/
I guess I'm at a loss here. If public schools are now overdoing phonics instruction, why are the states implementing LETRS, a teacher-training program designed to expose existing teachers to the seemingly radical notion of teaching phonics? After collectively spending billions producing each new annual crop of teacher's-college graduates, why to the states have to allocate this comparative pittance to re-educate those same teachers in the apparently foreign idea that alphabetic languages somehow represent spoken sounds? Why does Education Week feel compelled to write articles like this one, which takes pains to explain to its teacher audience that word recognition involves making letter-sound associations? Why does Louisa Moats, one of the creators of LETRs, feel that someone must “give people a knowledge base for doing the job”, where the "people" in question are teachers who've spent four or maybe six years in college apparently not having that knowledge base??? https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/letrs-program-teacher-training
Our national attitude towards teachers is one of dismissive superiority. Even those who purport to respect the profession feel the need to tell us how to do our jobs. 🤷
I don't dismissively look down on teachers. Rather I recognize that impressionable college students will tend to believe whatever they are taught by those who they perceive to be experts. I am not questioning the validity of LETRS here; I am questioning why, after four or six years in teachers' college, teachers cannot produce competent readers.
I don't think all research is dismissive of teachers, I do think the question is not "Why can't teachers produce competent readers?" but something more along the lines of "What factors are affecting literacy in US classrooms?"
When you start with classroom instruction you are starting pretty far downstream in the learning process. If the river is polluted asking the fisherman to change their casting method every few years is unlikely to produce results. It does, however, keep the focus away from other factors affecting the catch.
Absolutely. In fact, I discuss this problem extensively on this page of my literacy website: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
Excellent food for thought. Four years in to the laudable Science of Reading iniative (that is, when the research is in the limelight), and I think it's such a crucial time for some of the prominent voices and experts on teaching reading to articulate the nuances needed to help develop proficient engaged, readers. Honestly, I think the field of education keeps falling into the same trap because some mysterious stridency and group-think ascends. The educational publishing companies and their products are only as good as the researchers and practitioners conceptualizing the programs and advising them. Why is it that this "gone overboard" occurs? We will do right by kids when we take an honest look at the human dynamics of it all. There are hundreds of books, podcasts, resources, articles in the last few years that do an excellent job of describing science-based phonics/ early reading practices and the need for explicit, systematic instruction, and so on. But crucially-- why are so, so many conversations in print and podcast devoid of HOW phonics buddies up to writing, how read alouds are powerful, ways in which teachers can be SoR aligned and still be champions of trade books in the classroom, independent reading once kids get to that point. What do SoR leaders say about amazing phonics instruction AND the power of one-on-one moments with a learner? Let's describe science of reading aligned instruction more fully in the context of each grade-level classroom, so teachers can feel assured about all the other sound literacy practices that thrive along with it. The radio silence on the role of text sets, trade books, classroom libraries, early writing, poetry, shared reading and other practices is odd, and it leads to kids being cheated out of a literacy environment they deserve. Are SoR notables too afraid to say the wrong thing?
Well put. I have taught children with O-G tools and methods with great success. However, difficulties ensue when these sane students face unfamiliar text. It requires a studious attempt by the teacher or tutor to prepare the student for the upcoming challenges.
A lot of excellent points here. I have also been having a lot of discussions lately, with colleagues and friends with young children, about whether the over-prescription of teaching phonics is killing a love of reading. The groan when the reading books comes out of the bag and the cries of, "I don't want to do phonics now, Mummy!" It is almost that this association with the difficulty of mastering some of the sounds creates a fear of enjoying a good story - which absolutely can go beyond the words decoded on a page. I would love to hear any further thoughts on this from the Substack community.
I think a lot of the fire and friction can be taken out of the debate by distinguishing between decoding and reading.
Phonics helps children to be skilful and fluent decoders. Decoding is *part* of what makes a reader, but a child who can accurately decode the written words and recognise the sounds they make is not a complete reader. Phonics is not 'reading' in its entirety.
A child who can decode well may be a good reader, or they may not be. But all children who are good readers can decode well.
Where schools and educators understand this distinction, they can maintain fidelity to a clear systematic phonics approach, without losing sight of what else matters in developing the other interwoven components of being a reader - comprehension, inference, vocabulary, personal response, intertextual connections, the interconnections between reading, writing, listening and speaking, and so on.
To me, the process of developing a child as a reader should include phonics. The school in which I trained and first taught has 96%+ of students using English as an additional language, and the well-delivered phonics approach - short, snappy daily sessions of around 20-30mins - means most children are effective decoders of English by the age of 7.
I do feel that having fully decodable readers is an important part of this process too. I say this with a declaration of interest that writing these books is part of my livelihood, but also that my belief in them as a pedagogical tool comes from my continued teaching experience.
For children to be able to read a whole book independently, because it is precisely matched to their phonics decoding, gives children a sense of self-efficacy, agency and motivation which can then continue to propel and motivate them as they progress towards (what are commonly and a little harshly referred to as) 'real books'.
All the while, whilst they are doing their phonics-grounded learning, they are also accessing storytelling sessions, being read to, they are co-reading picturebooks that they cannot read independently.
If school curricula are mindful of the centrality of developing children as readers, they clear a path so that the right amount of time is given to different elements of reading - phonics, read-aloud, picturebooks, 1:1 shared reading, contingent talk around a book.
The percentage of my (teenaged) students who actively hate reading and will only read when threatened has steadily grown over the twenty years I have been a teacher. I truly believe that the emphasis on "reading at grade level" is harmful, students develop reading skills at vastly different rates and no prescribed curriculum will change that. The tighter your grasp, the more that slip through your fingers.