Powering students to independent reading with Sounds English

A growing problem faced by many schools been the high percentage of Year 3 children (estimated to be around 40%) who are still at early reader level and struggling to break through to independent reading. For many of these children, reading feels like a frustrating chore, and it’s also frustrating for other children in the class whose progress is slowed down.

Sounds English Phonics solves this problem. It is an app designed for children with a word recognition reading age of 6 to 9. It’s been independently proven to reduce the time it takes to progress students from early-stage readers to independent readers. In an independent study, the average gain in reading age was one year in 20 teaching days. It is suitable for all students, including EAL students and is dyslexia friendly.

To create Sounds English Phonics we analysed thousands of early-reader texts and discovered that there are 92 frequently occurring written sounds that an early reader will encounter. If children can use these 92 sounds in the synthesis of more challenging words they can progress quickly to reading for pleasure.

There are two sophisticated algorithms within Sounds English Phonics which personalises the learning to each child, teaching them only the sounds they do not know and using formative assessment automatically identifies the next written sound they should learn. In tests, every child using our app finished the term reading at least 120 words per minute – and once children reach this speed they start reading for enjoyment.

• Sounds English Phonics is the only app to have identified these 92 commonly occurring written sounds and contains over 1800 practice words.

• After the first couple of sessions, the app requires no adult supervision or teacher effort. It fits seamlessly into the classroom with a recommended usage of 15 minutes a day. It can also be used at home.

• Learning takes place in the fantasy world of Lumos, with stunning animation and appealing characters to hold children’s attention as they help the Lumins light up the Great Learning Tree. We also include videos for each sound to teach speech formation.

• An independent study carried out at St John’s Green Primary School in Essex and analysed by the University of Surrey has shown that children using the app improved their reading age by over 1 year in just twenty school days. Retention was checked and maintained a month later. The improvement was across boys, girls, EAL, SEN, PP and dyslexic children. In the control class only 3% improved by over 1 year.

• The University of Surrey calculated that Sounds English Phonics was 2.8 times more effective than methods used in the control class.