Dyslexia: Forget the Phonics!
Extract from National Curriculum English Appendix 1: Spelling
Forget the Phonics is a phrase used by dyslexia expert Emma Hartnell-Baker, The Word Mapper, to support parents of dyslexic students in Upper Primary who are required to learn specific spelling words. They can get confused when trying to apply previously taught phonics and get 'blinded by the letters' as wanting to spell 'was' as 'woz'. If you are not in England and use different word lists, you can apply Miss Emma's free Orthographic Mapping Tool to show which letters function as graphemes in any word. If you have the MyWordz® technology, you can also download any spelling lists you map and copy into a Word document to adjust the font type and size to suit the learner. Current special offer £75 per year.
Core phonics, taught through a classroom-based systematic synthetic phonics programme, is intended to kick-start self-teaching so that orthographic mapping becomes possible. Around 100 grapheme–phoneme correspondences are explicitly taught and tested in the Phonics Screening Check.
There are over 300 (see the Spelling Clouds®) however, and so a huge number of words that children are required to read and spell, there is at least one grapheme–phoneme correspondence that is never taught within these programmes. As a result, many statutory spelling words cannot be fully mapped using phonics knowledge aquired from a programme. This impacts on the children not self-teaching, with dyslexic students most at risk of this.
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For this reason, Emma Hartnell-Baker MEd SEN, project lead for Preventing the Dyslexia Paradox, has designed The Spelling Routine to support learning of statutory spelling words. Most of these words contain at least one grapheme–phoneme correspondence that is not taught in phonics, so the system deliberately sets phonics aside and focuses instead on word mapping. It is important that children understand that letters (graphemes) map to far more sounds than they have been taught and that the sounds they hear when spelling words are often mapped to graphemes not taught.
The Spelling Routine supports dyslexic students to store words in the orthographic lexicon, often described as the brain’s word bank, without relying on memorisation, spelling rules, or strategies that require remembering letter names, such as acronyms. These approaches do not lead to instant recognition or accurate spelling in long-term memory. Children need to store speech sounds (phonemes) with the graphemes, and know what the word means.
“Forget the Phonics”: Navigating an Opaque Orthography. The Spelling Routine offers a cost-effective and highly impactful KS2 spelling system for dyslexic students. Show the Word Code. Word Mapping Mastery® for all neuro-types.