Free TExES Science of Teaching Reading (293) Flashcards

The alphabetic code is arbitrary and has to be taught, not discovered. Without explicit instruction in a planned order, many children do not connect phonemes to graphemes and keep guessing from pictures or first letters. Explicit, systematic phonics teaches a limited set of correspondences, shows how to blend them, and reviews them cumulatively, the pattern the National Reading Panel found most effective, especially for children at risk.