David Reedy of the UK’s Literacy Association believes if there was a magic bullet for reading, we would have discovered it long ago. There is and we did, but it remains unpopular: making English spelling more regular.
Phonics advocates seem incapable of seeing that a method that is totally appropriate for phonic spelling systems cannot be as effective with a highly unphonic one like ours.
Masha Bell, Independent literacy researcher and author of ‘Rules and Exceptions of English Spelling’, Wareham, Dorset.