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Why is reading and spelling in English so hard? Many beginning readers and poor readers never learn the skills and knowledge to successfully read or spell. Unlike talking, reading isn’t something you learn to do by copying other people around you. Reading needs to be explicitly and systematically taught. It is very challenging for students to read and spell, because English is so inconsistent. Good quality phonics teaching, like Sounds Write, involves learning the sounds that go with the letters; but it also involves learning how the spelling system relates to the sounds of the language. This is where the…

Sounds Write is a highly successful approach to literacy intervention for children who have fallen behind in reading and spelling. One of the reasons for this success is that it focuses on one of the most critical skill in learning to read and spell. That skill is segmenting, and Sounds Write focuses on this from the very first lesson. Segmenting is the ability to split words up into their separate speech sounds. Students then blend the sounds back together to read a word. Why is segmenting important? Every unit in the Sounds Write approach starts with this word building because:…