Letter Sounds

The first question is 'What do I teach first: the letter SOUNDS or the letter NAMES?" Some will ask 'Does it matter?" and the answer is an emphatic 'YES!!!" because the strategy you teach first is likely to become and to remain the student's instinctive, automatic strategy. The student who has learned SOUNDS first can thus give an automatic sound for any letter - and they need that if they are to develop PHONIC skills (the blending of sounds and syllables).

However the student who learned letter NAMES first will instinctively go to her/his store of NAMES and then try to DEDUCE the sound from that name. This strategy works well for some letters: for example if you ask a name-dependent student "what is the SOUND of the letter 'T'?", he/she will instead access their memory for the NAME ('tee') and (from the initial 't' sound) correctly deduce the 't' sound.

The problem is that some sounds cannot be deduced in this way. For example the student who has established 'Y' as a NAME ('WY'), then takes the first part of the Name (WY) and incorrectly deduces that the sound must be 'w' (as in 'wig'). A similar problem arises for the letters c, g, w, y, a, e, i, o, u and suddenly we have a student lacking confidence in blending sounds and syllables, the very basis of reading long words, unfamiliar words and of spelling.