Readlong : The Complete Phono-Graphic Reading Program

Julian Dickenson

Is there anything more important for a child than learning to read?

Well can you imagine what it would be like if they couldn't read?

You can appreciate that their entire future depends on being able to do that very thing and do it well!

We tend to take for granted that our children will learn to read because most native speakers learn to do it naturally without ever knowing that it even happened, let alone how it happened. However, keep in mind that those who read well, consciously or unconsciously, understand that the alphabet is not just a series of letters put together randomly, but is in fact a code.

Good readers have an unconscious understanding of how that code works. Reading English properly means being to make sense of the code. Reading therefore means being able to 'decode'. However, not everyone learns to read properly and learning difficulties at school are often a sign of underlying reading problems.

Now think about the millions of second and foreign language learners who are forced to learn English at school but won't learn to read properly because they simply don't have enough contact with English beyond a couple of hours in the classroom every week and won't learn to decode as a result.

Learning English as a second or foreign language is hard enough as anyone who has ever taught it will testify. Now imagine just how much harder it must be for those children who look at the words in their text book and simply can't make sense of them but still have to learn them whether they want to or not!

Can you imagine what it would be like to learn a language if the words you have to learn appear to you as a mass of random letters without any particular discernable pattern? Readalong solves this problem by helping English language learners unlock the Alphabetic code. Readalong uses a phono-graphemic approach to learning to read which mimics the way good readers learn to read naturally and puts it all together in a simple but graduated way over four steps.

It would be fair to say that learning to read well is a necessary, even critical step in a child's development. If that's true, the question is, can your child decode? Can your child Readalong?