Many young children learn to sing the ‘A, B, C’ song in nursery or at home. This song teaches them the names and the order of the letters of the alphabet. It’s a great way to store the alphabetic order of letters in our long-term memories. I still use the alphabet song when using a dictionary! However, what beginner readers need initially is to know the sounds of the letters. Letter names can confuse and obstruct learning to read.

The most-important skill when learning to read is the ability to ‘blend’ (push together) sounds in words. In order to do this, beginner readers need to have an automatic recall of the sounds of the letters of the alphabet. The ‘A, B, C’ song teaches letter names.

Some children can handle learning both letter names and sounds together. However, many get confused: in English, most letter names and letter sounds are not the same. Letter names do not help children to remember the sounds the letters represent.

Take the letter ‘e’, for example: its name is pronounced ‘ee’, but the initial sound children need to know is /e/ as in ‘egg’. When the child reads the letter ‘e’ they may confuse the two sounds. They may read a word like ‘fed’ as ‘feed’.

Here are some other examples:

• Y: The letter name is pronounced ‘why’, which starts with the sound /w/, but the sound of the letter is /y/ as in ‘yellow’.
• S: The letter name is pronounced ‘ess’, which starts with the sound /e/, but the sound of the letter is /s/ as in ‘sand’.

There are many more. In fact, only about six letter names can help children to recall the letter sounds.

For beginner readers, this may be very confusing. We recommend that, while beginner readers are learning the sounds of the alphabet, teachers should teach only the letter sounds. Only once a child can recall the sounds of the alphabet confidently and automatically should the use of letter names and the ‘A, B, C’ song be encouraged in class.

If you have comments on this recommendation, or experience you can share, please do add them to this blog.