Even worse for children who begin with weakened language skills, which include students that are of the low income. For the would be LD students, the costs to unlearn and reteach reading costs school boards a pretty penny that may or may not be effective, as well as the LD students paying the price of having low literacy and numeracy skills.

Publishers of systematic synthetic phonics reading books are in a double bind here.

If they provide beautifully illustrated (but without deliberate picture clues), *fully decodable reading books, they do of course cost more to print, but schools are more likely to buy them and the children to choose to read them. As pointed out above, bold pictures will distract the child from smooth left to right continuous reading even if they provide no clues to the text.

* I use such books but find the solution is to cover the picture until the child has read the text.

If the publishers produce fully decodable books with minimal illustration then the whole language people attack the books for being boring and dull phonics ‘drill’ material.

I know this is true Susan,any excuse to not teach systematic synthetic phonics will be used.

Although I agree with you,Dr.Linnea Ehri,one of the researchers of the National Reading Panel,stated that while kids learn to read ,if we don`t use books that are 90% decodable,the students will revert to guessing.

We have a glut of problems to ever getting the good work of this instruction out there;it`s a war between faculties,egos and publishers.

Another consideration re illustrations is the huge number of children that are being taught to read in the English language when they are not English-language speakers.

These children need illustrations for learning to speak the English language and to help them build oral vocabularies.

Thus far, the dominant way of doing this is through familiar ‘themes’ but with accompanying words and sentences which are printed and beyond the children’s decoding knowledge and ability.

Some of these books now have introductions which sound as if the authors have considered relationships between letters and sounds (phonics) but the contents show this is not the case.

You may not be aware of this but the present UK government is unrelenting in its push to to get systematic synthetic phonics used properly in every primary school in England

The government recently brought out revised criteria for synthetic phonics programmes. It includes new advice on early texts to practise reading:

‘(E)nsure that as pupils move through the early stages of acquiring phonics, they are invited to practise by reading texts which are entirely decodable for them, so that they experience success and learn to rely on phonemic strategies. It is important that texts are of the appropriate level for children to apply and practise the phonic knowledge and skills that they have learnt. Children should not be expected to use strategies such as whole-word recognition and/or cues from context, grammar, or pictures.’

The government is also going to provide matched funding for schools to purchase genuine synthetic phonics programmes and decodable reading books.

We now have a wide range of excellent decodable (usually richly illustrated) book schemes available in the UK -see
http://www.dyslexics.org.uk/resources_and_further_11.htm
- so there is no excuse for teachers in England not to get on board the synthetic phonics bus!