How to Prepare Your Child for Phonics and Reading Success

How to Avoid Phonics Frustration

When Phonics Doesn’t Work for Reading:  Try Pre-phonics Training

Phonics fell out of favor as a primary method of reading instruction because too many children lack the language-processing skills to identify phonemes like/ba/ and /bla/. The accompanying drills and direct instruction in spelling, etc., also turned children off reading.

This led to a push for alternatives and, unfortunately, to a different set of reading gaps. And so reading instruction has come full circle back to phonics.

Phonics will work for reading instruction this time because programs like Fast ForWord now exist to strengthen language processing skills and prepare children for phonics.

Phonics instruction has turned millions of childern off reading for life, by challenging them to hear sound differences they can’t yet process. The solution is to build the auditory processing skills needed to “get” phonics.

The resurgence of phonics in classrooms marks a major shift in reading instruction. Driven by the Science of Reading, educators are returning to explicit, systematic phonics after decades of whole-language and balanced-literacy approaches.

How The Brain Reads

The brain stores language in three ways: phonological (how it sounds and how it is heard), semantic (meaning), and lexical (text). Reading connects text to meaning via how the language is heard.

When phonics doesn’t work for reading, it’s because language processing isn’t accurate, and word memory and text don’t match. and learning to read becomes a chore.

We first learn language and meaning orally. Reading requires mapping the oral word memory to the lexical text. For good readers, the brain is able to map oral word memory to text – every word eventually becomes a sight word. Sounding out is used only occasionally. This lexical-semantic mapping makes reading automatic and effortless.

Most reading instruction that maps lexical (text) to oral word memory uses a combination of phonics for the 85% of words that are phonetic and memorization for the so-called “red words” (words not spelled phonetically, like /people/).

If your child is reading fluently, that suggests she is successfully mapping lexical form directly to semantics.

However, if the listening is inaccurate because language processing skills are underdeveloped, the words you hear do not match the words you see, and the mapping process is compromised. If you hear “pish a ten” but read “pitch a tent,” you won’t connect the two when reading, so you will start creating a whole new lexical language.

If all reading instruction is phonics-based and you aren’t processing well enough, your path to reading proficiency is effectively blocked. This was the case for millions of children who were tortured by phonics.

“Phonics” also includes explicit instruction in all aspects of written text, such as spelling and punctuation.

Not only did all of this explicit instruction not help their reading, but the laborious punctuation instruction and phonics drills that required them to hear sound differences beyond their processing abilities also turned millions of children off reading, many for life.

The Search for Phonics Alternatives

This dead-end problem with phonics and the quite laborious explicit instruction of all the rules of language, including spelling irregularities and syntax, lingered for many years.  But in the 1950s and 1960s, a movement moved away from phonics toward whole language, with the primary goal of making learning to read less miserable and prioritizing a love of reading.

Whole Language

Whole language,  popularized by Kenneth Goodman in the 1960s, aims to make learning to read like learning to speak, avoiding laborious direct instruction and the block many children encounter when they can’t process well enough to grasp phonics.

By taking this “shortcut” to reading, the hope was to preserve the love of reading that is often lost in the years of direct instruction required by the phonics approach.

Instead of laboriously working up from letter sounds to words to meaning (phonics), the whole language approach is meaning-based. It works top-down, focusing on comprehension, context clues, and visual memory to read words as a whole within stories, aiming to make reading a natural, enjoyable process.

Whole language was indeed the promised shortcut to reading proficiency for many children, partly because, alongside whole language instruction, their brains mapped oral word memory to text in the background, even if they hadn’t received much formal phonics training.

However, for those who did not “get” reading and did not hear the final/t/ in /tent/, the lack of formal phonics training severely hindered their reading progress. Their brains did not make that mapping, so they were stuck.

Balanced Literacy

This led to the concept of Balanced Literacy, which blends whole-language instruction with explicit phonics instruction. It fosters a love of reading through a balanced approach—reading to, with, and by children—incorporating read-alouds, shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading.

Balanced literacy often prioritizes meaning and context over strict decoding, so phonics remains somewhat in the background. It uses leveled texts based on reading grade levels, rather than phonetic texts aligned with phonics instruction.

However, reading scores remained low, so the tide is turning again back toward phonics. Balanced Literacy is giving way to Structured Literacy, which is systematic and explicit and prioritizes phonics.

This shift is driven by the emergence of the Science of Reading as an influential movement across North America. The phonics comeback can also be attributed in part to the Sold a Story podcast.

The Science of Reading

The Science of Reading refers to a body of research — spanning cognitive science, linguistics, and education over many decades — that examines how the brain learns to read. The research shows reading comprehension comes down to two broad skills:

• Decoding ability and
• Language comprehension.

If either is compromised, reading suffers. This led to the concept of the five pillars of reading, which require mastery: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

The Science of Reading describes the reading progression as follows:

1. Robust speech and language processing
2. Phonological awareness (sound-based skills)
3. Phonics (mapping sounds to letters)
4. Decoding accuracy
5. Automaticity
6. Fluency
7. Comprehension

More details on the 7 steps to reading proficiency here.

The Science of Reading draws on decades of interdisciplinary research showing that reading develops best when children are explicitly taught the relationships between sounds and letters, while also building the language and knowledge needed for comprehension.

Why Phonics Instruction Often Fails

No doubt, making phonics a minor part of reading instruction was a mistake, and this return of phonics is overdue.

But even with strong phonics programs in place, thousands of children continue to struggle. They sit in classrooms hearing the same sound-symbol lessons as their peers, yet the learning doesn’t stick. They memorize patterns one week and forget them the next. They blend sounds slowly, inconsistently, or not at all.

The stages of phonics instruction are typically as follows:

• Listening & Phonological Awareness (PreK–K): Letter sounds, rhyme, and alliteration without using letters.
• Initial Letter Sounds (K): Single consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words, e.g., \ cat \.
• Blending & Digraphs (K-1): Two-letter sounds, e.g., \ sh \.
• Consonant Blends & Complex Words: Blends at start and end of words, e.g., \ stop \.
• Vowel Teams & Alternative Spellings (1st-2nd grade): Long vowel patterns, e.g., \ oa \ and alternative spelling, e.g., \ ph \.
• Fluency & Fluency Rules (2nd grade and up): Multisyllabic words, reading speed, and spelling rules, e.g., suffixes \ -ing,\

Despite increased phonics instructional time, tutoring, and structured literacy interventions, many students continue to fall behind, mainly because the processing speed required to hear similar-sounding syllables or the blended consonants at the start and end of words is either difficult or only possible with concentration.

Phonics Instructional Methods

• Synthetic Phonics. Blending individual sounds. Needs: clear sound discrimination + blending ability.
• Analytic Phonics. Analyzing whole words to find patterns. Needs: stable sound representations + memory.
• Analogy Phonics. Using word families to decode new words. Needs: strong phonological awareness.
• Linguistic Phonics. Working with consistent rimes/patterns. Needs: rapid sound retrieval + blending.
• Embedded Phonics. Instruction using the text. Needs: already-smooth decoding.

Every phonics method assumes the child can hear, hold, and manipulate phonemes. But that’s not the case. Pre-phonics training builds these skills.

The fact is, these children are not ready for phonics. Their cognitive skills have not matured enough to process the language. \ Ba \ and \ da \ sound the same to them, no matter how many times the teacher repeats them.

And because they are unable to accurately pick out these sounds, other required skills, such as holding sounds in working memory, also do not develop. And so they lose ground – visibly, not getting phonics, and invisibly, as other cognitive skill development is delayed.

These children need what research now confirms as missing in many reading interventions: Pre-phonics.

Science of Reading and the Phonics Comeback in 2000

The momentum of the Science of Reading accelerated following a National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, which synthesized evidence on effective reading instruction. Researchers like Louisa Moats and Keith Stanovich have been instrumental in advancing the field, challenging “whole language” approaches that had dominated classrooms and replacing them with phonics-based literacy methods.

Strands of Research in the Science of Reading

Fast ForWord: Pre-Phonics Training

The issue isn’t the phonics program.The issue is out-of-sequence instruction – phonics before language processing is developed. Many children are not ready for phonics.

A number of software and listening programs have emerged to sharpen processing skills. By far the most popular and most researched is Fast ForWord, provided to parents at home in North America by Gemm Learning.

The Fast ForWord neuroscientists were pioneers in the Science of Reading movement, recognizing the importance of developing pre-phonics skills, phonemic awareness for phonics and fluency, and accurate listening for vocabulary and comprehension.

It is the foundational stage in which a child’s auditory system, language skills, memory, and attention are strengthened to the point where phonics instruction can take hold. This is the Fast ForWord software–used by Gemm Learning.

Phonics Assumes a Set of Auditory and Cognitive Skills that Many Children Don’t Yet Have

Research from Paula Tallal, Michael Merzenich, and subsequent neuroscience teams shows that children with reading and language difficulties often have:

• Trouble distinguishing similar phonemes (e.g., /b/ vs. /d/)
• Difficulty blending sounds
• Poor working memory for sound sequences
• Low attention control during complex language tasks

Yet phonics lessons assume these skills are already in place.

But many children enter school with delays for many reasons, including ear infections, speech delays, and hereditary factors. Phonics instruction makes no sense to them. As a result, they hit a wall and stay stuck for years.

The Key Pre-Phonics Skills

The broad skillset required is language processing, also known as accurate listening, which requires:

• Auditory Processing Speed. The brain must analyze speech sounds quickly enough to distinguish between phonemes. It’s like adding pixels to sound. Faster processing, clearer sounds, better auditory discrimination.
• Phonological Awareness (the sound structure of language). You need to listen well enough to think about and manipulate what you are hearing for rhyming and blending.
• Auditory Working Memory. Children must hold sound sequences in mind long enough to decode them.
• Sustained and Selective Attention. Focusing on sound details for extended periods is essential for learning sound-symbol correspondence.

If language processing is underdeveloped, phonics rules feel abstract and disconnected. They may as well be another language!

These skills are not an optional enrichment. They are the neurological on-ramp to phonics.

Is Your Child Failing Phonics?

For children with solid auditory and language foundations, phonics instruction works beautifully. It unlocks the alphabetic code and leads to reading automaticity and a lifelong love of reading.

But children with weak foundations experience:

• Slow, effortful blending
• Frequent guessing
• Poor retention of phonics rules
• Confusion between similar sounds
• Exhaustion from trying to sound out every word

Teachers see this struggle and often double down on phonics instruction. But if the child cannot process well enough to distinguish between |ba| and |da|, it really doesn’t matter how many times the teacher repeats it. It forces the child to, at best, guess, and at worst, get frustrated.

The issue isn’t that phonics doesn’t work as a way to learn to read. The issue is out-of-sequence instruction.

You cannot build decoding on top of weak sound processing. You must first build the auditory system. This is exactly what Gemm Learning offers through the Fast ForWord reading program.

Fast ForWord Accelerates Cognitive Skills

Pre-Reading Skills, Then Phonics, Then Reading

The theory is simple. Children come to school with immature, underdeveloped processing and cognitive skills. The Fast ForWord solution aims to simply accelerate the maturation and development of these skills.

It provides an intense amount of language stimulation, equivalent to hearing 3 million words, in 6 months.

Fast ForWord was created by neuroscientists to strengthen the brain’s capacity to process language—especially rapid, complex speech signals. Unlike phonics instruction, it does not teach letters or decoding rules. Instead, it helps map oral word memory to text automatically.

Rapid Auditory Processing
Exercises stretch the brain’s ability to identify rapid frequency changes in speech.

Auditory Discrimination
Children learn to distinguish similar phonemes more precisely.

Phonological Awareness
Fast ForWord builds clearer phoneme representations in the brain.

Working Memory
Children practice holding auditory information long enough to manipulate or recall it.

Sustained Attention
The program strengthens sustained, selective, and divided attention.

Language Structure and Vocabulary
Comprehension improves, preparing students for broader reading demands.

This is not tutoring. This is neural-level preparation for reading, aiming to make reading a natural extension of listening, rather than just more practice on the reading surface, using a set of rules to work around the natural connection to reading.

And once pre-reading skills strengthen, phonics instruction finally starts to work the way research predicts.

However, hearing the sounds is not enough. The ultimate goal is for phonics to become automatic and effortless, resulting in reading fluency and accurate sound comprehension.

Fast ForWord accelerates processing skills to the point where automaticity is natural for phonics and decoding.  It is the strongest evidence-based program for building these foundational reading skills. It prepares the brain for reading for children who:

• Have had phonics training, but cannot retain phonics rules and still struggle
• Have had auditory processing, language, or working memory delays
• Have a slow and labored reading style
• Have limited reading comprehension

After using Fast ForWord, Gemm Learning students experience rapid progress in phonics, decoding accuracy, reading fluency, and comprehension, as well as a renewed interest in reading.

Conclusion: Pre-Phonics Unlocks Phonics for Struggling Readers

The Science of Reading has rightly brought phonics back to the center of reading instruction. But for many struggling readers, phonics is not the right first step—it’s the right second step.

Before phonics can work, the brain must process language accurately, distinguish phonemes clearly, and understand language structures

While these capacities are part of a natural development curve, they are not guaranteed. If maturation is delayed, an intervention must accelerate development.

Fast ForWord is the most research-validated pre-phonics intervention available, and Gemm Learning provides it with expert oversight, personalized pacing, and constant support.