Phonics teaching in England needs to change – our new research points to a better approach

By Dominic Wyse, Professor of Education, UCL
Alice Bradbury, Professor of Sociology of Education, UCL

Arguments about the best way to teach children to read can be intense – they’ve even been described as “the reading wars”. In England, as in many other countries, much of the debate has been over the use of phonics, which helps children understand how sounds – “phonemes” – are represented by letters.

The government requires teachers to use a particular type of phonics teaching called “synthetic phonics”, and the emphasis…

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