The entire written English language has at its foundation the understanding that letters are coded symbols which stand for sounds. (The word phonics comes from the Greek word, phonos, which means sound.) An understanding of the phonetic structure of the language is necessary if a struggling reader is to become a good reader.

Difficulty with the important initial step in learning to read often does not originate from visual perceptual problems or neurological problems, but from improper learning techniques that do not focus on pronunciations of unfamiliar words.

Stage one must be mastered before proceeding to any of the following stages.

As passages are read, the meaning of each word must be incorporated into the context of the passage. At first, reading is slow and laborious as students carefully examine each word. But when the decoding process becomes automatic, that is, in both speed and accuracy, attention is freed from the slow and labor-intensive effort of decoding to the acquisition of higher-level comprehension skills.

Once reading becomes both accurate and fluent, the task of reading becomes one of understanding the content and its intent. During this stage, the students expand their knowledge base.

In stage four, students learn to read more complex materials from various sources and learn to assess its value and relate it to the subject at hand. This is critical to success.

Even very young students can learn to relate material to their own situation if the material is on their appropriate level of understanding. Ideally, this type of intellectual pursuit increases until it eventually reaches a college or university level. The reader synthesizes information from a variety of sources to form and evaluate hypotheses.