This is generally the case as, by Year 4, most teachers no longer include phonic instruction in their daily teaching. Students who are struggling with basic decoding and encoding skills will find great difficulty in attending to comprehension of texts in reading, and the structure, composition, purpose, punctuation, grammar etc. involved in writing. Aspects of our literacy instruction relating to the instruction of punctuation, sentence structure, text organisation, interpretation of text, forming opinions, etc. are reliant on the successful acquisition of basic encoding and decoding skills. Current approaches to higher skill instruction generally fail due to students inadequate automaticity in reading and spelling. By the middle years and secondary years of schooling, instruction relating to phonemes and graphemes is essentially non-existent.
Emphasis is primarily on instruction of strategic reading and writing skills.
Most teachers believe that students who have not got it by then will never get it . Some of these students may eventually make the connection between the relationships between the sounds we hear and the variety of ways we write them by adulthood and feel that the education system failed them. Furthermore, many teachers fail to acknowledge the most common phoneme that is the basis for many spelling errors. These connections enable students to reach automaticity in reading and spelling that is critical in facilitating appropriate responses to further literacy instruction. Teacher Aides and others providing support to students with literacy learning difficulties must also have access to such PD activities.