The Letter-Sound Study

In his classic article, Clymer (1963) discussed his analysis of the utility of 45 phonic generalizations culled from four popular basal readers. He reported that only 18 generalizations met his minimum standard of 75 % utility. Four decades later, Johnston (2001) suggested that neither Clymer nor any subsequent researcher offered “a useful guide to what needs to be taught. ” This begs the question: If previous approaches yielded limited guidance for teachers, would a methodical analysis of the letter-sound relationships in a relatively large word corpus yield a useful guide? The following shows that, indeed, such a systematic analysis unveiled remarkable phonic transparency within the English language, and that these results may be written as generalizations that serve as a useful and comprehensive phonic guide for teachers