According to a past Director of the National Literacy Trust (Guardian Education 7/10/03) there was no 'golden age' when the majority of our children were readers. History says otherwise. Prior to 1870, before state education was introduced in the UK, literacy was 92% (West p163) 'The Poor Law Commission in 1841 found that 87% of workhouse children in Norfolk and Suffolk between the ages of nine and sixteen could read' (Mount p178) Literacy was 98% in the USA, before 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state to introduce compulsory schooling (Richman) Literacy was considered essential so people could read the Bible, but writing was not taught as it was thought that too much education would give common folk ideas above their station and result in civil unrest; Hannah More (1790), who established Sunday Schools for working class children, is quoted as saying, 'I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make them fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety' (Kerr. p85).

Back in the days when parents assumed complete responsibility for their children’s education, reading was taught in a common sense way using phonics and sounding out. There was none of today's, 'memorise the high frequency words as whole shapes, fit the method to the individual child's learning style or guess the words from the context, the picture or its first letter', nonsense. Children were taught how to read, not expected to decipher the opaque English alphabet code for themselves.

Nowadays, the ‘miracle’ of 90+% of children becoming literate AND who love literature does still occur, but you have to go to schools which have completely ditched the 'searchlight' multi-cueing strategies and are using a genuine, synthetic or linguistic phonic programme first, fast and exclusively (and enthusiastically!), to see it happening. Such a school is Elmhurst Primary in Newham, east London, an area of high deprivation. Synthetic phonics (Read Write Inc) is the sole method of teaching children to read at the school and, as a consequence, they have no 'dyslexics'. The headteacher, Shahed Ahmed, says, “More than 90 per cent of our pupils speak English as an additional language and we have 20 per cent mobility''. The school 'has 1,000 pupils and not one of them leaves unable to read' (TES. Lightfoot. 12/08/11) St Thomas Aquinas Primary is another high achieving school. It uses a linguistic phonics programme, Sounds-Write. The school's test results show that at the end of three years, of fifty children who started YR and finished Y2, 98% had spelling ages in excess of their chronological ages. Of those children, 64% had a spelling age of 9.6 or above.

In 1911, G. Stanley Hall, an American professor of education, wrote on the subject of dyslexia, 'It is possible, despite the stigma our bepedagogued age puts on this disability, for those who are under it not only to lead a useful, happy, virtuous life, but to be really well educated in many other ways' (Quoted Ravitch p358) Attempts to put a positive 'spin' on dyslexia still occur today - dyslexia as a gift! Entrepreneur Guy Hands, previously owner of the music company EMI, has severe dyslexia and 'hates people who say "dyslexia is no bad thing, look at all the famous people who have got it". He will not shirk from saying: "I really wish I could read" (Observer. 13/01/08)

The late Martin Turner, formerly head of psychology at Dyslexia Action, said that it was a 'travesty' to talk about dyslexia as a bonus when it caused such suffering. ''It's a myth that there are compensatory gifts. Dyslexics go into the visual arts like sheep head for a gap in the hedge. They aren't more creative, they are more stressed.'' (Jardine) In a review of the research on dyslexia, Dr. Rice and Professor Brooks came to the same conclusion. ''On anecdotal evidence, the belief that ‘difficulty in learning to read is not a wholly tragic life sentence but is often accompanied by great talents' may seem attractive. However, systematic investigation has found little if any support for it.'' (Rice/ Brooks p18) The 'dyslexic' journalist A A Gill confirmed this view when he wrote, 'In truth, of course, dyslexics end up in the art room or the music studio or the drama class after school, because it’s the only place they aren’t special-needs remedial. They get good because they can’t do anything else.' (Times 08/04/07 The Fish Club)

The ability to read and write well is central to a happy and successful passage through life in our society. Professor MacDonald says, 'My own research on the psychology of adult illiteracy has amply demonstrated that the ability to read is probably the most significant factor (out of many) in determining a person's sense of autonomy and self-worth.'(MacDonald p5) Intellectual independence also relies on good reading skills. 'Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself.'(Gatto p56) Reading failure correlates with aggressive, anti-social behaviour more strongly than any social or economic indicator. (Turner/ Burkard p13)

You do not have to delve very far into the world of educational academia to discover the so-called 'Reading Wars'. This is a long running and acrimonious debate between those who say that children should be taught to read solely through the direct and discrete phonics method and those who insist that mixed-methods work just fine. (Kohn p159) The controversy extends into the progressive education community where many members take the more extreme 'whole-language' position. They insist that all children can learn to read through informal 'discovery' methods given enough time, a print-rich environment and a helpful adult on hand, just as they learnt to walk and talk (Fortune-wood p47-8, Williams p75); 'The essential constructivist principle is that teachers should teach nothing directly, but rather function as coaches while their students basically teach themselves'. Professor Stephen Krashen, 'a self-described 'staunch defender' of whole-language strategies, believes that "(A)ny child exposed to comprehensible print will learn to read, barring severe neurological or emotional problems...Kids learn to read by reading'' (Allen)

''One of the major exponents of real books, Margaret Meek, has famously said that children learn to read "when there is something they want to read and an adult who takes time and trouble to help them". Whole language enthusiasts suggest that structured teaching to develop reading skills is not only unnecessary, it may be positively harmful'' (Palmer. TES. 10/11/95)

For an idea of the difficulty involved in learning to read using an opaque alphabet code, look at this re-coded, first line of a well-known nursery rhyme and work out what it says: ytoxto hruxsz ub ldyyuos xtmo (answer at the base of this page) 'This example provides the adult reader with some idea of the child's first experience with print. If you stared at this passage for years, you wouldn't have the slightest idea how to decode it. Why then should we expect a child to decipher the English alphabet code, one of the most complex ever designed, without direct instruction? (D.McGuinness WCCR p17)

Advice, commonly given, that the choice of method to teach reading should depend on your child's particular learning style (Lowe/Thomas p19 Armstrong p60-63) is incorrect. Although this advice sounds, on the face of it, sensible and reasonable, it does children no favours -see Learning Styles. The multi-sensory issue is too often used as an excuse to promote multi-strategy teaching, also known as 'balanced literacy', which is actually very UNbalanced as it focuses almost exclusively on one strategy, predicting (guessing), using one sense, the visual. For true multi-sensory learning **lessons should provide 'multiple tasks that reinforce all possible sensory and motor systems: listening (phoneme analysis), looking (discriminate letter shapes/learn spelling patterns, visual tracking), writing (kinesthetic movement), and speaking (speech-motor system, auditory feedback) to anchor the spelling code in memory as quickly as possible' (www.ourrighttoread.com/englishalphabet.html)

Research shows that children are predominantly reliant on auditory skills to learn to read expertly (Macmillan p126-132), writing being a coded transcription of the sounds in our speech. As Mona McNee says, 'We read with our ears. We spell with our ears' (McNee p3) Children who have had 'glue ear' or regular episodes of moderate hearing loss in early childhood are at increased risk of difficulties with learning to read, as are those who have acquired a dominant visual (whole-word) learning habit as a result of poor initial teaching. Both sets of children need more practice in the auditory aspects of reading and will not be helped by any method that reinforces their visual tendencies. This does NOT mean that time should be spent on discrete listening (phonological) exercises. Research shows that what develops all children's reading skills best is time spent working with the sounds AND letters together. “Teaching children to manipulate phonemes using letters produced greater effects than teaching without letters (NRP. 2000).

For the majority of children it doesn't seem to matter if a mixture of methods is used to teach them to read. Most children, especially those with good visual memories, do manage to memorise the high frequency words and discover various strategies to read the other words in their whole language readers. Sadly, a large percentage of these, to all appearances, successful readers, will have had a more difficult time learning to read than is necessary, will remain poor spellers and will be unable to read the more unusual words found in adult level literature and advanced educational texts (school English books contain around 88,500 different words (D.McGuinness ERI p216). The insidious effects of mixed methods create young people who dislike reading and writing and are the cause of the vast numbers of teenagers who 'stall' in their studies at the secondary stage.

Parents may be concerned that their children will be damaged if they start to teach them to read at too young an age, having heard that it is dangerous to impose anything 'developmentally inappropriate' on young children. There is no scientific basis to this idea. Sir Jim Rose noted that, ''(T)here is ample evidence to support the recommendation of the interim report that, for most children, it is highly worthwhile and appropriate to begin a systematic programme of phonic work by the age of five, if not before for some children...'' (Rose Review. para89) ''...an appropriate introduction to phonic work by the age of five enables our children to cover ground that many of their counterparts in other countries whose language is much less complex phonetically do not have to cover''(Rose Review. para99) When living in a print-saturated environment, many children attempt to read at a very early age. 'Letting them drift along using their invented strategies, without intervention, may harm them for life' (D.McGuinness WCCR p135)

Many parents have successfully taught children much younger than five to read using a suitable synthetic phonics programme; if the schools in your area are of poor quality or you are unsure of the schools' methods to teach reading then this isn't 'hot housing', but a wise precaution. 'Bright' children will also benefit from an early start. Chartered psychologist, Professor Joan Freeman says, 'In my practice I see several children a week who can read, write and make excellent conversation, and who are well under school age, some as young as 2. No parent or teacher can make a child do this if they are not capable. The children are otherwise normal and happy and keen to learn. The numbers of them that I can see could doubtless be multiplied by many hundreds around the country. The proposed prohibitions by the anti-early-literacy group to stop enthusiastic children from getting the basics of literacy at nursery would be a cruel blow to their lively searching minds' (Guardian.letters. 25/07/08)

'Once a child can read independently, the growth of many other skills is promoted' (Research cited- Macmillan p7) 'Reading... opens some important doors...it gives the young learner a degree of autonomy and independence...also gives a child access to the whole culture of literacy. Reading makes it possible... to have access to vast quantities of stored knowledge...' (Howe '97 p154) 'The increased reading experiences of children who crack the spelling-to-sound code early..have important positive feedback effects. Such feedback effects appear to be potent sources of individual differences in academic achievement' (Stanovich. Matthew Effects p364) Furthermore, delaying the start of formal instruction can be detrimental, especially for boys, '(D)elaying the start of school for a year has no benefits and is likely to lead to a substantial drop in IQ...the largest reading ability sex differences in the world occur in countries such as Denmark, Finland and Sweden where children don't start school until age 7' (RRF 51 Macmillan)

Early Years 'expert', Sue Palmer, ally of Steiner teacher Dr. Richard House and author of Toxic Childhood and 21st Century Boys, is one of those who tars the teaching of early reading using synthetic phonics with the 'formal' brush, once describing advocates as, '(A) rabble of back to basics diehards' (Palmer. TES 10/11/95). More recently she said that it was 'cruel and mad' to expect the majority of 5 yr.olds to be able to write simple sentences (NurseryWorld 11/1/12). Instead, she recommends a later, 'balanced' approach (www.suepalmer.co.uk/balance.php) to literacy teaching, which results in reading failure for a significant percentage of children. But, as Sir Jim Rose said, 'The term ‘formal’ in the pejorative sense in which phonic work is sometimes perceived in early education is by no means a fair reflection of the active, multi-sensory practice seen and advocated by the review for starting young children on the road to reading' (Rose Review. Summary p3) The anti-synthetic phonics lobby like to use the phrase 'drill and kill' to describe direct and discrete phonics teaching, yet 'thrill of skill' is the reality for children taught by an experienced and enthusiastic teacher using the synthetic phonics method.

''Currently, the most vehement opponents of synthetic phonics are the Early Years lobbyists. Their belief system has it that teaching five- year olds to read is detrimental to their physical and mental well-being. They quote Finland where children do not begin ‘formal teaching’ until much later and learn to read easily to bolster their case...But there is nothing ‘formal’ about synthetic phonics teaching. It is multi-sensory and fun and can be achieved in 30 minutes a day, leaving several hours to be filled by child-initiated play, sand, water, painting, outdoor play, you name it.'' (Shadwell. issue 88. 2006)

The Early Years opponents of synthetic phonics consistently fail to mention the evidence from Denmark and the Netherlands on the teaching of early reading, possibly because it doesn't suit their agenda. The evidence from Europe clearly shows that, 'Foundation literacy acquisition by non-English European groups is not affected by gender and is largely independent of variations in the ages at which children start formal schooling''(Seymour/Aro/Erskine p150); 'Danish shares with English the features of a deep orthography and a complex syllable structure. In Denmark children do not enter primary school until they are 7 years old. Despite this 2-year age advantage, they experience difficulties in acquiring the logographic and alphabetic foundation processes which are comparable to those observed in English, although less extreme' (Seymour/Aro/Erskine) As in England, Scotland and Wales, compulsory education begins at age 5 in the Netherlands. Despite this allegedly 'premature start' to formal schooling, Dutch children join those in the majority of European countries who 'become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year' (Seymour/Aro/Erskine) 'In countries with a straightforward alphabet writing system, where each sound is represented by only one symbol, learning to 'crack the code' takes about twelve weeks for all children' (D.McGuinness GRB p9)

Having a transparent alphabet code is not the only reason why children in most European countries learn to read and spell so successfully (accurately) and quickly; many European countries teach reading using the quick, simple and confidence-building method - synthetic phonics; letter names and sight words are not taught. This combination of a transparent alphabet code and the synthetic phonic teaching method means that, 'poor readers (children who can't decode) are rare to nonexistent in many European countries' (D.McGuinness GRB p240)

''(O)ur alphabetic system is not transparent as it is in Finnish, where there is only one way to spell each sound in the main. Our code needs to be introduced carefully from the simple to the more complex by teachers who understand it themselves. Left until six, our children will already have developed look and stare strategies, along with guessing and be well on the way to making a dog’s dinner of understanding the code.''(Shadwell. issue 88. 2006)

Evidence suggests that many readers who have learnt through a balanced approach or the 'discovery' method are handicapped by their lack of phoneme awareness ability and advanced alphabet code knowledge. As a result they have difficulties reading (decoding) unfamiliar words (real or nonsense), and with spelling. Use Ruth Miskin's Nonsense Word Test to check decoding ability: http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=103&n_issueNumber=50

This evidence is further supported by some fascinating research carried out by Just and Carpenter which looked at the eye movements of readers. This showed that, despite appearances, expert readers do not skip words or look at words as 'wholes' but attend to and process the individual letter/sound correspondences in every word as they are reading (Research cited -Macmillan p68)

Individual letter analysis is necessary because many words differ from another by only one or two letters - sad/said house/horse treat/threat. If, during reading, many words are guessed at and misread, it can completely change the sense of the text making it a meaningless, confidence-sapping exercise.

The eye movement research underlines the fact that people understand the term 'sight word' in different ways. The most common understanding is that sight words are high frequency words (very common words in print) which need to be learnt as global wholes by memorising their shapes and prominent letters. This is advocated by infant teachers who use mixed-methods. They say it gives children a quick start and is good for self-esteem because once they have memorised some of the high frequency words, if used along with multi-cueing strategies, the children can begin to access the classroom's whole language scheme books independently and feel, right from the beginning, that they are really reading.

The supporters of the Dual Route reading model theory (see method 2) have a different interpretation of the term 'sight word'. It is one which is stored, they believe, in a size-wise limitless 'orthographic whole-word store' in the brain, all its letters in the correct order ready for instant processing, going straight to 'meaning' without any sound involvement, it having been phonologically decoded successfully in the past. Readers, they believe, eventually read every word holistically, except for rare or unknown words. N.B. the Dual Route supporters' interpretation of the term 'sight word' is embedded in the 2006 Rose Report (Rose Report 2006 Appendix 1.paras 52, 54).

There is a third understanding of 'sight word'. Synthetic phonics experts say that a 'sight word' is a word that a reader has successfully decoded many times before. As a consequence, it is read so fast that it may feel to the reader, and certainly appears to onlookers, as though it is being read instantly as a global whole. Eye-movement and brain studies show that the expert reader, whether reading aloud or silently, is still decoding all-through-the-word (translating graphemes to speech sounds) but this is done at a subconscious level. Only when the skilled reader comes to a previously unencountered word do the skills of phonological decoding come back into consciousness. '(R)ecent brain studies show that the primary motor cortex is active during reading, presumably because it is involved with mouth movements used in reading aloud. The process of mentally sounding out words is an integral part of silent reading, even for the highly skilled' see p90 www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/pspi/reading.pdf

Read the following (real) book title to examine your own phonological decoding skills. As an expert reader who implicitly understands how the Alphabet Code works, you'll find yourself tracking through the unusual words slowly left to right, one sound unit at a time, mentally sounding out as you go, blending the sounds as you proceed. 'Nonscience and the Pseudotransmogrificationalific Egocentrified Reorientational Proclivities Inherently Intracorporated In Expertistical Cerebrointellectualised Redeploymentation with Special Reference to Quasi-Notional Fashionistic Normativity, The Indoctrinationalistic Methodological Modalities and Scalar Socio-Economic Promulgationary Improvementalisationalism Predelineated Positotaxically Toward Individualistified Mass-Acceptance Gratificationalistic Securipermanentalisationary Professionism, or How To Rule The World'. Brian J. Ford (Wikipedia. Nonscience)

The most important socialising force for a child is their peer-group. The influence is especially strong during middle-childhood (6-12 yrs) (Harris p226). This factor needs to be considered in the reading equation. A child, whose every day, same-sex companions, in school or out, consist of other children who think that reading is 'not cool', will copy those attitudes, ignoring those held by parents or other significant adults. This is another important reason for teaching children to read as early as possible, before any anti-book, peer-group influence takes hold.

All early language stimulation will accelerate a child's mental development with permanent advantages. 'All the evidence shows that the major predictor of becoming a good reader is the development of good language skills during the early years of life.' (D. McGuinness GRB p9-10) With this in mind, looking at books and reading together should begin in babyhood and be an active exercise. Good preparation for learning to read, with nursery age children, is the practice of oral segmentation; as you talk to your child split the sounds of key words such as 'drink your j-ui-ce', 'it's on the ch-air', 'find your c-oa-t', 'here are your sh-oe-s'...This is a gentle introduction to how words work.

There is a, 'widespread and pervasive misunderstanding that poor decoders are, in some way, intellectually inferior' but, 'we can make no judgements about an individual's intellect based upon their decoding skills' (Elliott. LDA Bulletin p13) Alexander Faludy, described as 'so severely dyslexic that he can barely write', won a place at Cambridge University at the age of 14. (Times 17/01/98) Another high IQ 'dyslexic' (he has the spelling ability of an 8 year old), Ben Way, was a multi-millionaire businessman by the age of 20 (Telegraph 10/01/00)

Children with low IQs and mental handicaps can be taught the mechanics of reading. This can be seen clearly in a condition called hyperlexia; the children concerned are good decoders but, because of the accompanying intellectual disability, their reading comprehension is usually very poor. Mona McNee, founder of the UK Reading Reform Foundation, taught her own son to read using synthetic phonics despite the fact that he has Down's syndrome (McNee p8). The researchers Cossu, Rossini and Marshall found that Italian Down's syndrome children could read (decode) quite competently having been taught the transparent sound-symbol correspondences of the Italian alphabet code but they lacked comprehension of what they read.

There is a widely circulated myth that too much emphasis on decoding through phonics causes children to 'bark at print / word-call', the belief being that, 'As long a a child is decoding text, the brain is preoccupied and cannot assimilate the intellectual content of text' (E.Carron. TES), but, 'There is no research evidence indicating that decoding a known word into a phonological form often takes place without meaning extraction. To the contrary, a substantial body of evidence indicates that even for young children, word recognition automatically leads to meaning activation..when the meaning of the word is adequately established in memory. (RRF 50 Stanovich p8)

''Experienced practitioners and teachers point out that, in the course of phonics teaching, as children 'start to get the hang of it', they begin to self-teach and 'need to read a lot to consolidate their skills', that is, to develop effortless reading and focus more and more on comprehending the text. At this point, children may appear, some would say, to be 'barking at print' without fully understanding what they are reading. Although this is often levelled as a criticism of phonic work, such behaviour is usually transitional as children hone their phonic skills. Given that even skilled adult readers may find themselves 'barking at print' when they are faced at times with unfamiliar text, it is hardly surprising that children may do so in the early stages of reading'' (Rose Review para 49) Expert SEN teacher, 'palisadesk' says, 'You find the phenomenon of children who decode very well but understand almost nothing in only two populations: children with intellectual disabilities [see 'hyperlexia' above] and children with very limited English' (Kitchentablemath blog 30/12/08)

Research, studying factors that predict children's reading ability, showed that in Britain the strongest predictor at age seven was the mother's level of education rather than the child's IQ (D.McGuinness WCCR p29). As Tom Burkard explains, 'When teachers don't teach, the education children receive from their parents becomes of paramount importance, and the children of ill-educated parents are at an overwhelming disadvantage' (Burkard.2007.p30)

It's interesting to note that a very small number of children (mostly girls) learn to read when they are very young without any formal instruction, seemingly by 'osmosis' of the print around them. They have inherited a natural talent for hearing and monitoring the phoneme level of speech, a good auditory memory and a gift for visual detail. In addition they will have had a great deal of parental interaction where books are concerned. With this lucky combination of nature and nurture they have managed to figure out on their own how the alphabetic code works.

Parents need to be aware that widely varying degrees of the inherited subskills helpful in learning an opaque alphabet code can occur amongst siblings. It is not unknown for one child in a family to have learnt by the 'osmosis' method whilst another has the 'potential to muddlement' (McNee p81). Time spent on a effective programme (see Resources10) will be worthwhile and the younger the child the easier and less onerous the job will be. Parents have a big advantage here if they do it themselves, as evidence suggests that how fast a child learns to read is directly related to the amount of one-to-one instruction received (D.McGuinness WCCR p30)

The alphabet is used as a letter code for the individual sounds in our speech and, like all codes, it is difficult to decipher without the correct and complete 'key'. The English alphabet spelling code is particularly difficult to learn. It is the most 'opaque' in the world, due to the Norman-French, Danish, Latin and Greek spelling systems which, over time, were mixed in with the original (635 A.D) transparent, Anglo-Saxon system. 'For example, ch is used to spell /ch/ in Anglo-Saxon words such as chair; is used to spell /k/ in Greek derived words such as chorus; and spells /sh/ in French-derived words such as charade and Charlotte (Moats)

English, Danish, Portuguese and French are, in that order, the European languages with the most 'opaque' alphabet codes. English and Danish also have a complex syllable structure. Greek, Finnish, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch are much easier to learn as they have a majority one-letter/one sound correspondence.

Because our alphabet has only 26 letters, many of the 44 sounds (phonemes) in English have to be represented by two letters such as /sh/. Most sounds have multiple spellings (graphemes) consisting of 1-4 letters (e.g. the sound /ie/ can be spelled 'fly', 'tie', fight', height'...) and some spellings represent more than one sound, called 'code overlap' in linguistic phonics programmes (e.g. great, clean, bread / touch, sound, soup). Whilst linguists estimate that there are 350-400 English spellings in total, there are only about 180 common spellings. These are the ones that need to be directly, discretely and systematically taught in every early reading programme.

http://rrf.org.uk/pdf/conf2011/Diane_McGuinness_RRF_conf2011.pdf
The English Alphabet Code - talk given by Diane McGuinness at the RRF conference 2011.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2010/7-8/rousseau-for-the-digital-age
Tom Burkard: Rousseau for the Digital Age

Pamphlet for Londoners by Miriam Gross: So why can’t they read?
http://www.cps.org.uk/files/reports/original/111026195203-whycanttheyread.pdf

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8157689/The-writings-on-the-wall-for-our-failing-education-system.-But-can-anyone-read-it.html
The writings on the wall for our failing education system. But can anyone read it?

In support of early, explicit phonics teaching:
http://ednews.org/articles/26125/1/In-support-of-early-explicit-phonics-teaching/Page1.html

www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/pdfs/Rising_Marks__Falling_Standards.pdf
Rising Marks, Falling Standards: SATs, National Strategies, Reading Recovery...

The teaching of literacy: Reflecting a profession without a strong foundation.
http://ednews.org/articles/18737/1/The-teaching-of-literacy-Reflecting-a-profession-without-a-strong-foundation/Page1.html

www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmeduski/121/121.pdf
House of Commons Education&Skills Committee publication: Teaching Children to Read, published March 2005.

http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/i/independent%20review.pdf
Rose Report: 'Independent review of the teaching of early reading', published March 2006.

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/Publications-and-research/Browse-all-by/Documents-by-type/Thematic-reports/Reading-by-six-how-the-best-schools-do-it
Ofsted report Nov. 2010. Reading by six: how the best schools do it.

James Delingpole: My kids can read, in spite of school: Educationists have long known there is an idiot-proof method of helping our children to become literate. So why are pupils being denied the key to all learning?
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article3215774.ece

www.ruthmiskinliteracy.com/pdf/comprehendingdecoding.pdf
Comprehending Decoding.

http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/newsletter/archives/developmentalism.pdf
Developmentalism.

http://dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=24206
Excerpt from Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,746473,00.html
Lost for Wurds

www.psy.cmu.edu/~rakison/PDFs/TeachingReading.pdf
How Psychological Science Informs the Teaching of Reading

http://www.nrrf.org/article_anderson6-18-00.htm
The Reading Wars.

http://www.rrf.org.uk/docs/Dissertation_Robins.pdf
Beginning Reading: influences on policy in the United States and England 1998-2010

http://eddie.idx.com.au/2008/98teaching.html
Education for Tomorrow: Teaching: the fourth factor

http://coreknowledge.org/mimik/mimik_uploads/documents/433/Ph%20is%20for%20Phonics.pdf
Ph is for phonics: the great decoding debate.

http://coreknowledge.org/mimik/mimik_uploads/documents/431/When%20Two%20Vowels%20Go%20Walking.pdf
When Two Vowels Go Walking by Matthew Davis

http://www.minettemarrin.com/minettemarrin/2009/02/index.html
Marrin: I’ll spell it out: if children can’t read, lives are ruined

http://www.minettemarrin.com/minettemarrin/1998/12/the_teachers_pl.html
Marrin: The teachers' plot to make our children into failures.

www.minettemarrin.com/minettemarrin/2002/12/why_do_they_mak.html
Marrin: Why do they make teaching reading harder than ABC?

http://www.minettemarrin.com/minettemarrin/2005/06/spelling_out_wh.html
Marrin: Spelling out why black schoolboys fail

www.nrrf.org/87_med_mal.htm
Medical Malpractice and its Reading Instruction Analogy.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1418481,00.html
'When words fail them: Shockingly, a quarter of our children leave primary school illiterate. So why ignore the solution?'

www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAAD6.htm
A French Lesson.

www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/index.htm
Interviews with some of America's finest teachers, literacy institution leaders, brain scientists, and others involved with the teaching of reading.

www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/pspi/reading.pdf
How should reading be taught?

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Lyxgk3cF6B4C&pg=PA52&lpg=PA52&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
Handbook of early literacy research Vol.2 -ch.4 by Ashby and Rayner on eye movement research.

http://nurtureareader.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-ed-schools-dont-teach-reading.html
Schools of education don't teach reading

http://www.senmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=113&Itemid=60
The Carriacou & Petite Martinique synthetic phonics project

Diane McGuinness comments on the review of the Research Literature on the use of Phonics in the Teaching of Reading and Spelling, by Brooks, Torgerson and Hall https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/RB711.pdf
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** Diane McGuinness explains multi-sensory learning: Brain Science for Reading Teachers
''The cognitive systems of the brain rely on cross-modal processing to form what are known as "routines" or "subroutines" -- which are carried out in the dendrites in "neural circuits." In a complex act, various subroutines/circuits are linked up in the brain (via neural pathways), because each one of them occurs in a different region. Thus, if you teach phonemes linked to letters, and reinforce this via writing, you have connected up the auditory cortex language areas of the medial left hemisphere, (phonemic analysis and synthesis already in place because of language), with something NEW - i.e. visual symbols (not ordinarily part of language processing) which engage the posterior occipital regions of the brain responsible for visual pattern analysis, and then link both to a kinesthetic response by writing what you hear and see, which engages the fine motor processing systems governed by the motor cortex (usually left hemisphere superior motor gyrus). When you link all three as you process text (or generate text via writing), these three systems of the brain "cooperate" and reinforce one another, and this doubles the speed of learning. You have three different parts of the brain (plus their subsidiary regions) acting in tandem''
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Answer: London Bridge is falling down

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