Here is an excerpt from Mike Lloyd’s book ‘Phonics and the Resistance to Reading’ (page 42):
“Recognising whole words by memorising the appearance of the word (sometimes known as the ‘look-and-say’ approach) is highly problematic. The capacity to remember words as whole-patterns is highly limited and in any case highly inefficient. As Professor Martin Kozloff points out, a child who makes the effort to learn ten words in this way is left recognising just the ten words. But a child who learns ten grapheme-phoneme correspondences is able to read hundreds of words, including of course words that the child has never met in print before – let alone had to commit to visual memory.”