I saw a post by Larissa Phillips @larissaphillip today 22nd November 2025 and tweeted her.
Larissa:
Phonics-skeptics fuss over this sort of thing, but the majority of low-skilled readers who come to my adult literacy program can’t decode or encode even three-sound words that they don’t know. They can’t read words like rad or tot or zig-zag.
Couldn’t we all agree that it would be helpful to be able decode the 50-85% of English words that ARE phonetically predictable? Or do they propose just guessing on all of them?
I wish they’d talk to the people who are affected by this inability.
I can tell you exactly what they would say because I hear it all the time: “Why didn’t anyone teach me this?”
This was my response:
