Most children start to read by learning to recognise whole words (cat, me, the). However, soon they are encountering so many complex words that they cannot memorise them all.

At this stage, they need to develop decoding skills, so they can ‘sound out’ unfamiliar words they encounter. To be able to decode words, a child needs to understand that:

• Spoken conversation can be broken up into words, and words can be broken up into syllables and sounds
• The written letters on a page represent spoken words
• Each letter (or group of letters) represents a sound (or several sounds). For example, the letter ccan make a ksound (as in cat) or a s sound (as in city), and the letters owcan make several sounds (as in howand low)
• Sounds can be blended together to make words
• Often there are rules that tell us which sound a letter will make (for example, the letter csays swhen followed by the letters e, i or y)

Many children pick up these skills easily, either by themselves or with some help at school. However, some children (some research suggests up to 30%) need to be carefully taught these skills.

Knowing about sounds is important for reading

Phonological awareness, or knowing that words are made up of sounds and syllables, is an important skill for beginning readers. Many of the children who struggle to acquire reading skills have difficulties with phonological awareness skills such as

• Identifying rhyming words
• Perceiving the difference between similar sounds (for example, mand n)
• Identifying the first sound in a word
• Remembering the sequence of sounds in a word
• Blending sounds together to form words
• Breaking words into syllables