Luca, diagnosed dyslexic, was doing exactly what we want: he used partial decoding to try to work out the word, using the GPCs he already knew: ‹ear› as in fear and ‹ear› as in bear, the two sound values he had been explicitly taught.

He had not been taught the sound value of ‹ear› that he needed to decode heard. Had the word appeared in context, we would expect him to decode it because he knows the word, and he would have applied Set for Variablty (SfV). This is why it is so important that we do not focus on words in isolation.
 

As it was presented in isolation, Emma Hartnell-Baker gave Luca the word mapped with Phonemies® so that he could see the sound value. He could then get to the word. This shows why Phonemies®, as phonetic symbols for children, matter so much.

Self-Paced Orthographic Learning (SPOL) is a term coined by Emma Hartnell-Baker. Grounded in the self-teaching hypothesis, it describes how children independently acquire new written spellings and letter patterns, word by word, as they read. Orthographic learning means committing the visual forms of words to memory so they can be recognised automatically.
 

In SPOL, self-paced learning means that children can progress according to their own orthographic learning needs, rather than waiting for whole-class instruction. The teacher therefore needs to have a really good understanding of how children learn to read, and how to map the Alphabetic Code. Self-teaching can begin after a sufficient kick-start of explicit instruction, or when a learner has the outstanding phonemic-awareness skills needed to bypass explicit phonics instruction and begin self-teaching.
 

Hartnell-Baker’s SPOL framework adds a practical layer: when a learner meets a gap, they can use MyWordz®’s bidirectional word-mapping technology to check the code and continue learning, rather than waiting for explicit instruction.