Ensuring that children develop word recognition and language comprehension

Development of word recognition skills

Children need to be taught:

• grapheme-phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences (the alphabetic principle) in a clearly defined, incremental sequence
• to apply the highly important skill of blending (synthesising) phonemes in order, all through a word to read it
• to apply the skills of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell them
• that blending and segmenting are reversible processes

'The sequence of teaching phonic knowledge and skills should be such that children should have every opportunity to acquire rapidly the necessary phonic knowledge and skills to read independently.' Independent review of the teaching of early reading, paragraph 86, page 28

To develop their word recognition skills, beginner readers need to do the following.

• Set up processes for identifying letters.
• Acquire a store of essential phonic rules, processes to link graphemes to phonemes and blend phonemes into words. In the first instance, the store of phonic rules will contain the single letter-sound correspondences that are typically the first rules children are taught. Development involves expanding the number of stored rules and incorporating increasingly complex and conditional rules.
• Establish a store of familiar words that are recognised immediately on sight and linked to their meanings. Development involves expanding the store of words and completing their representations (storing all letters of the word in the correct sequence). The term 'sight vocabulary' is a shorthand label for this store.

Figure 3: Diagrammatic representation of the word recognition system

Understanding and application of the alphabetic principle underpin not only the application of phonic rules to decode words but also the ease with which a store of sight vocabulary is developed. As the store of sight vocabulary expands and representation of words in it becomes more complete, many - if not most -children develop a 'self-teaching' mechanism, which enables them to infer more sophisticated, complex and conditional phonic rules (see the Rose Report, paragraph 56, page 87).

For further and more specific guidance on the implications of the Rose Report for the teaching of early reading, please see Phonics and early reading, available on the electronic Framework.