How to learn to read

SIR – How refreshing to hear that reading standards in schools are now the best in a generation (report, December 5). I cannot, however, understand why the phonics method met with such “staunch opposition” when it was reintroduced.

The use of phonics, where children are taught to read by learning individual sounds, was standard practice until the Sixties. The government then introduced the Initial Teaching Alphabet method, which replaced the standard alphabet with characters and Roman letters to represent sounds. This ensured that a child’s first and lasting experience of the spelling of a word was incorrect.

The “look and say” method that followed did nothing to alleviate this disaster. Akin to attempting to build a house before buying the bricks, this method dictated that a child learn to recognise whole words or sentences by shape. Children were only taught their letters later on.

In the early Nineties, alarmed at how children had been systematically failed in the teaching of literacy over the past 30 years, I set about teaching my children to read using the traditional phonic method.

They both started primary school as fluent readers. Ros Groves

Watford, Hertfordshire

SIR – As a headmaster, I spent many fruitless and frustrating hours trying to persuade my local education authority that phonics should be widely used. I was always given the silly response that, like the measles, children would “catch” reading.

I hope my opponents are still alive to realise what damage they did. Mike Aston

Stourbridge, Worcestershire