Before asking Reception and Year 1 teachers to split words into syllables, teach syllable types, spelling rules or use other ‘structured literacy’ type activities, we need to establish whether teachers can map any word they encounter into phonemes and graphemes, as expected by the education department.

If they can, they may not need to do anything more than support bidirectional word mapping, and use activities such as the 60 Second Spelling Routine to bond phonemes, graphemes and meaning in the orthographic lexicon. Every child self-teaching before Grade 2.

‘Get in. Get out.’ As much explicit instruction as they need, and no more. We need to reduce the explicit instruction needed, not add to it.

Adding morphology, looking for ‘vowel sounds’, teaching the history of words, etc. may be information children don’t need in order to move into self-teaching and towards orthographic mapping.

This isn’t an argument for ignoring morphology. Morphology can complement word mapping. The issue is when these strategies are employed because the children aren’t able to map words, and because the adults can’t either. It’s often why they go looking for something else.

Before adding more information for children to learn, we need to establish whether teachers themselves can do what the education department expects: identify the phonemes in words and the graphemes that represent them, and support children to make those connections bidirectionally.

Add Word Mapping Training to your calendar for 2027.