Adult and Workplace Literacy

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has measured literacy in Australia and discovered that more than 46% of adults have severe problems with reading.

There is one significant reason for this; between 1970 and 2000, Australian students were taught a reading technique called "sight reading". Words were taught as "word-lists" and they were memorised through repetition.

Almost all schoolchildren in those years were taught using "sight reading".

Sight Reading means that students are expected to memorise word shapes. But an average person will have more than 100,000 words in their vocabulary, and it is impossible to memorise 100,000 word-shapes.

Sight Reading means you read slowly - you concentrate so much on the words that you lose the meaning. It means there are thousands of words you don't recognise, so you guess what the words mean. It means, after reading a paragraph, you can't remember the beginning, and you can't answer simple questions about the meaning. And your spelling is not accurate.

What Phonics does
Phonics is a system, invented many years ago, that allows a reader to "sound out" words, so that you can recognise them from a word in your vocabulary. It is highly effective, because when you "sound out" an unknown word, you can almost instantly recognise it from your vocabulary (you don't sound every word - just the ones you don't recognise).

This process is called "decoding", and it allows you to decode and recognise more than 95% of English words.

Regardless of whether you are 50 years old, or five years old, you need to "decode" the text to read properly. After a while, repetitive words become instantly recognised, and it is only the less frequent, longer words that you need to decode.

Fantastic Phonics Program
Fantastic Phonics is available for individuals and business organisations.