Letter Names or Letter Sounds? Why It Matters Now

For learning to read, your child needs the sound a letter makes, not its name. The letter called "bee" makes the sound b. The letter called "double-you" makes the sound w. A child who reads cat as "see ay tee" has three letter names and no word. Letter names are useful later, for spelling aloud and for talking about words, and nobody is suggesting you hide them. But in Reception and Year 1 the sounds are the working tool, and that is why school keeps asking for them.

Myth: letter names come first, because that is how we learned

Many of us were taught the alphabet as names, then left to work out the rest. English primary schools now do it the other way round, because sounds are what a word is actually made of.

The order the sounds are taught in is chosen so that real words appear almost immediately. Little Wandle starts Reception Autumn 1 with s a t p i n m d g o c k ck e u r h b f l. Read Write Inc starts Set 1 with m a s d t i n p. Jolly Phonics starts Group 1 with s a t i p n. None of them is alphabetical, and all of them let a child read sat, pin and tap within days.

An alphabetical order would delay reading by months, because a, b, c, d, e makes almost nothing.

Myth: 26 letters means 26 sounds

English has considerably more sounds than it has letters, which is the whole reason phonics takes two years rather than two terms.

On top of the single letters come the ones that work in pairs. sh, ch, th, ai, ee, oa and the rest are each one sound written with two letters, and igh and air are one sound written with three. Counting letters tells you nothing useful about how many sounds a word has.

Myth: teaching the names will confuse a child learning sounds

It will not, and most children pick both up without difficulty. Plenty know the names before they start school from songs, fridge magnets and their own name on a peg.

What causes confusion is mixing the two in the same breath while a child is trying to read. If they are stuck on hat and you say "that is an aitch", you have handed them information they cannot use in that moment. Say the sound instead. Save the name for a different conversation.

Sounds-Write takes the strongest line of any scheme here. It calls itself linguistic phonics and starts from the sound rather than the letter, so children are asked how a sound is written rather than what a letter says. That framing removes the problem entirely, because the letter never gets treated as the thing that makes a noise. Children on Sounds-Write talk about sounds and spellings, and are taught from the first unit that a sound can be written with one, two, three or four letters.

Reading is done with sounds. Talking about reading is done with names. Your child needs both, but not in that order.

Myth: the alphabet song is doing harm

It is not. Knowing the alphabet in order is genuinely useful, for finding things in lists, for spelling a surname down the phone, for later dictionary work.

The only thing to avoid is treating the song as reading practice. A child who can sing the alphabet and cannot blend s-a-t has not yet started reading, and a child who can blend s-a-t and cannot sing the alphabet is doing fine. The two facts are not connected, and one does not predict the other.

Myth: my child needs all the letters before they can read anything

Six sounds is enough to start. That is the design.

Bug Club Phonics puts s, a, t, p, i, n in its Pink 1 band and expects children to read words with them straight away. Jolly Phonics does the same with its first group. Sounds-Write opens with a i m s t and builds three sound words in Unit 1. Your child will bring home a book built from a handful of sounds long before they have met the whole alphabet, and it will be a real book with a real story in it.

If that book looks absurdly easy, it is meant to. Decodable describes the fit between a book and one particular child, not a quality of the book itself.

Myth: it does not matter exactly how I say the sound

It matters more than almost anything else you do at home, and it is the easiest thing to fix.

Say mmm, not "muh". Say a crisp t, not "tuh". Essential Letters and Sounds gives parents a useful split here: bouncy sounds, b d g k p t, are said short and crisp, while stretchy sounds, m s f l n r v z, are held and stretched. Get those right and blending gets noticeably easier, because your child is no longer trying to blend extra sounds that are not in the word.

You can hear them said properly on the Oxford Owl parent pages at oxfordowl.co.uk if you want to check your own.

Myth: saying "kuh-a-tuh" means my child has got it wrong

They have not got it wrong. They have blended exactly what they were given, and somewhere along the line they were given an extra sound on the end of each consonant.

The repair is short. Say the word in clean sounds yourself, once, and let them try again. Do not explain the problem, because a five year old cannot act on a description of their own pronunciation. Give them the model and move on.

The same applies when they read a word correctly and then say it oddly. Hearing you say it right is worth more than being told they said it wrong.

Myth: letter names never matter

They matter, just not for decoding. A child needs names to spell a word out loud, to say which letter comes next, to tell you they wrote a b when they meant a d, and to talk about their own name.

Names are also the only sensible way to refer to a letter that has more than one sound. You cannot ask a child about "the letter that says c" when c turns up in cat and in ck and in ch. You ask about the letter c, and that is a name.

There is one more quiet use for names. Every scheme has a small set of words that cannot be sounded out, and children are taught to recognise them rather than work them out. Little Wandle calls them tricky words and starts with is, I and the in Reception Autumn 1. Read Write Inc calls them red words and tells children to stop and think rather than sound them out. Essential Letters and Sounds calls them harder to read and spell words. When you talk about those words with your child, letter names are often the clearest way to do it.

So the honest answer is that names are a labelling tool and sounds are a reading tool. Both get used. They just get used for different jobs, and only one of them is urgent in Reception.

So when do letter names arrive?

Gradually, and mostly without ceremony. Schools introduce them alongside the sounds rather than holding them back, and by Year 1 most children move between the two without noticing.

By then the interesting work has moved on anyway. Little Wandle spends the whole of Year 1 on Phase 5, which is alternative spellings for sounds children already know. Letters and Sounds Phase 5 covers ay ou ie ea oy ir ue aw wh ph ew oe au and the split digraphs. At that point the question is not what a letter is called but which of several spellings a sound has taken this time, and the phases make that progression visible.

What this means for the screening check

The Year 1 phonics screening check is taken in June, one to one with a teacher. It is 40 words read aloud: 20 real words and 20 made-up ones, the made-up ones printed beside a small alien so children know not to expect to recognise them.

Those made-up words are the reason letter names will not help. A word your child has never seen cannot be recognised or guessed, so the only route through it is sounds. It is a decoding test wearing a friendly hat, and nothing about it rewards reciting the alphabet.

Where to go next

If you want one change this week, make it the sounds you say. Clean mmm, clean t, no "uh" on the end. Then carry on reading aloud to your child from books far harder than they can manage themselves, because that track builds vocabulary and appetite and runs alongside the decoding rather than competing with it. If your school uses Little Wandle, the books follow a published term by term order.

Lindo Phonics is not connected to Little Wandle and is not endorsed by them. We match the published progression so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught.