Recently, I was flicking through a lovely book in the school library about a bear wanting to learn to read. As I continued to read on, I felt a buzz of excitement- this could be another perfect book to share with the hub team, teachers and reading leaders, a way to inspire and support our ongoing work with early readers.
That is… until they started teaching the bear to read by learning the alphabet!
It is often a common and understandable misconception that we learn to read by first learning the letters of the alphabet. In reality, focusing too much on letter names and the alphabet can actually hinder a child’s reading journey.

Think about it: there are 26 letters in the alphabet, but only a handful (the long vowels) actually make the same sound as their name. The rest? Their names sound completely different from the phonemes they represent.

Let’s take a simple word like “sat”. If a child tries to decode this using only letter names: “ess (s)…ai (a)…tee (t)… what they get is “essaitee” which sounds nothing like “sat”. This is often a challenge that many young children face when starting school, already knowing the letters names in the alphabet, but not the sounds.

As Diane McGuinness explains:
“Letter names are a source of ‘noise’ which block an automatic connection between sounds and their spellings. ‘Catch-up’ readers, in particular, rely on a strategy of mixing sounds and letter names when they try to decode.”

In this case, children are foten linking the visual symbol (the grapheme) to the letter name, rather than the phoneme it represents. Their brains start forming pathways based on these mismatched connections, which later need to be untangled and relearned.

John Walker puts it clearly:
“Teaching letter names and sounds is harmful to some. The problem is cognitive load and confusion about the nature of the code: sound to print not letter name to print”

This isn’t to say that the alphabet doesn’t matter- of course it does, but its power in reading comes from understanding the alphabetic code- how letters and combinations of letters represent sounds.

As the Reading Framework explains:
“Letters are a code, a way of writing down the sounds of speech. English has a complex alphabetic code: 26 alphabet letters have to do duty, singly or in combination, to represent the 44 or so sounds (phonemes) of English and they do so inconsistently. In Spanish, German and Welsh, for instance, one grapheme almost always represents the same phoneme. English, however, has more than 70 common correspondences between phonemes and graphemes and hundreds of rare ones.”

So, when meeting parents of new starters, this term, and they ask “Should we practise the alphabet over the summer holidays?”- pause, and think of the bear in the book.
Instead of the alphabet, he would have benefited more from playing some oral blending games, some fun rounds of ‘I-spy’ to begin recognising initial sounds, singing nursery rhymes and from watching videos of pure sounds being pronounced. These activities have been proven to be far more effective in building the foundations of reading than reciting the alphabet… and likely to be much more fun too!