If Gallileo was right on the point that the alphabet is the greatest invention in human history, involving at least eight great minds over 5,000 years, it is hardly surprising that some children struggle with learning to read and write, especially when the alphabet is used as inconsistently as it is in English, with 500 or so relations between sounds and letters, known as graphemes. (This number is often under-counted).

For English-speaking children, learning to use the alphabet means linking:

• A phoneme, in the case of most consonants, ‘said’ with a following UH vowel, known as ‘schwa’, and in the case of the five letters for the short vowels in hit, hen, hat, hut, hot, for a system which lacks a single letter for the sixth of these vowels, the one in put and hood, and the first, unstressed vowel in away and asleep;
• The six short vowels in hit, hen, hat, hut, hot, and hood, the long vowels in he, haw, hah, who, the various diphthongs like those in hay, high, hoy, and high;
• The stop consonants in pea, bee, tea, Dee, cale and gale, the nasals in may and nay, the fricatives in say and zoo, the liquids in raw and law, the glides in woo and you, the digraphs as in thin and path and shin and wish, affricates as in chin and John, or with three letters in witch and badge, doubled letters for single sounds, as in hammer and sorry, doing different things in successive syllables, the special cases of H only used before the vowel in hen, high, how, and of X used for two sounds after the vowel only in what are known as ‘lexical monosyllables’, as in fox, fix, mix, hoax and coax, and the two commonest words in English. a and the, using different letters for the same vowel, known as ‘schwa‘, both what are known as ‘functors’, and 100 or so other cases;
• In many cases, the relation between the position of a letter in the word and a given phoneme, as one letter in see and two in mess, or affecting only one of the vowel letters, A, E, I, O or U, in the case of ‘silent E’, not silent and in the wrong order in middle and little;
• The special cases of TION in station and other such words and TIO in Horatio, all loaned from Latin, where a three or four letter sequence represents one or two invariably unstressed syllables;
• A number of other exceptional cases, often with only a single exemplar, like the short E sound in bury (exceptional also in having only one R), in contrast to merry, ferry, wherry, Jerry, Derry. and xenophobe and psyche loaned from Greek hundreds of years ago but preserving the written form of the Greek which, unlike English, allows KS and PS at the beginning of a syllable;
• The marginally different system for a hundred or so ‘functors’, those words whose only role is in relation to one or more other words or the sentence as a whole, and the system of contractions, written with the apostrophe, as in wouldn’t and would’ve;
• The geometry of a letter in terms of lines and curves or parts of something like a circle;
• The way the letter is formed by hand (always starting at the top, sometimes initially moving leftwards, as with lower case A and capital S and O), often with a stroke joining one lower-case letter to the next;
• The familiar letter name (which proponents of Systematic Synthetic Phonics refuse to countenance). By an alternative, older approach, the more inconsistent the system the more useful it is to have a name for whatever is used inconsistently, in this case letters.

To my way of thinking, not to recognise that learning all of this is anything other than an enormously demanding task is just intellectually dishonest. It dishonours primary school teachers throughout the English-speaking world. The complexities here are all denied by proponents of the sloganeering Systematic Synthetic Phonics.

From hearing to writing

What is heard as speech is a continuous stream with no separation between the words or speech sounds, other than in pauses. There are clues about the words and syllables from the prosody or rhythm, the changing levels of stress and the rises and falls of the intonation. But where the individual sounds begin and end is not well-defined at all in everyday, running speech.

The unpicking

Teachers have found clever ways of squeezing the considerable complexity here into a small number of hours. But the obvious difficulty of this is not swept away by the slogans of ‘Systematic Synthetic Phonics’. It is possible to systematise the commonest graphemes (letter sound relations). But this only works for an arbitrary subset of these, defined by the 26 letters of the alphabet. There are actually only quite a small number of entirely simple cases like cat, dog, sat and mat. With 44 sounds in most ‘standard’ varieties of English today (on many counts) and only 26 letters, exceptions are made for the vowels in good, food, and put, the U in bury, the EIGH in eight, the N’T in wouldn’t, and four hundred and seventy something other such cases. Or fudges are found.

The familiar letter names help to describe in simple ways what is happening in all of the 500 or so cases – if this is not disallowed.

I still remember the teacher who came to teach me for one day while I was off school for nine months with bovine tuberculosis. He seems to have unpicked for me what had been a mystery of for me for the preceding two years of school: What was the relation between letters, sounds and words? He opened a book for me in the most literal of senses. Without his help, my life would have almost certainly have proceeded quite differently.