am a friend of the National Literacy Strategy. If it had subscribers, I would be one. It was right to make literacy a major national initiative. It is right to extend the NLS into to secondary schools. And it is dead right to target specific help to those Year 7 pupils, mostly boys, whose achievements in literacy suggest they are under-performing. I have long hoped for a major intervention that would turn them around before the curriculum leaves them far behind.

But I am a frustrated friend. In the course of recent consultancy work, I have seen the new literacy progress units in action. In all cases the teaching was attractive: good order and relationships, a lively pace, clearly focused objectives, and so on. In all cases too, the teachers, or assistants, stuck exactly to the published form. Why then, am I frustrated?

It is the units. They are thorough and detailed; they are based on an analysis of the weaknesses of most level 3 children in the key stage tests, but that is part of the problem. For example, I have just seen the unit on capital letters and full stops being taught. It was crisply presented; the teacher followed the script, and the kids co-operated. But, when I looked at examples of prose in their English books (not available in the classroom), none had difficulties with using caps and stops accurately.

The unit took no account of where these pupils were, yet the teacher felt obliged to work through the series as it stands. It was similar with a spelling unit in another school: the whole lesson was devoted to a rule the class already knew, and mostly applied accurately. In short, precious time was woefully wasted.

Worse still, the materials follow Ted Wragg’s formula for blighting young lives (TES, November 16): they detach language from meaning and purpose. They are obstacle courses that turn problems - which are real enough - into abstractions. They begin with a definition, or rule (first obstacle).

They exemplify it (second obstacle) with what linguists used to call “John and Mary” sentences - now perhaps, Posh ‘n Becks sentences. These are discrete sentences specially composed or selected to illustrate a language rule. The principle, or rule upon which the sentences focus is reinforced with further discrete sentences (third obstacle), to be manipulated, joined, extended, and so on, and then composed independently.

What the class is not invited to do (fourth obstacle), is write for real, to get right in the lesson anything that they might be currently drafting for a purpose in, say, science, English, or history.

Except that they are kindly taught, the units repeat the worst mistakes of the days when “remedial departments” seldom remedied anything. They are rooted in exactly the same blinkered logic: this says that because most children’s weaknesses lie at word and sentence level, they shall do much more of what they are bad at - let meaning, context and purpose go hang! Such rough old ways help to explain the alarming scale of our current adult literacy problems.

Perhaps the least suitable unit is phonics; a conscientious team sat me down to explain that teaching the concept of the phoneme to the target group had simply proved insuperable. Yet fluent reading has nothing to do either with using the term, or with an explicit and repeatable understanding of the concept. Had fluent and accurate reading ever depended on being able to define “phonemes”, the whole nation would have been illiterate before 1923, when the term was adopted.

Phonological awareness, important for effective reading, is a child’s growing sense of the connections between words, sounds and letters. It involves phonemes, but not the term, and arises from hearing, sharing and discussing books and stories with pleasure and engagement. The progress units make no provision for this vital experience, yet poor readers have generally had far too little of it.

The units provide the extreme example of a danger that is inherent throughout: by focusing so closely upon word and sentence work, they neglect the text level (the meaningful, purposeful bit). They separate language rehearsal from its embedded use. Confident primary schools have been here before: they adopted the NLS on their own terms, and promptly adapted it. Wise secondary schools will follow.

Graham Frater, an independent adviser, and former HMI, is the author of Effective writing at key stage 2 (2001), a Basic Skills Agency survey