Phonemic awareness must exist or be explicitly and directly taught BEFORE phonics instruction begins. Otherwise, the phonics will not make sense to the dyslexic child. Phonological processing starts by knowing which speech sounds are represented by which written letters. The goal of teaching phonics is to make phonological processing fluent and automatic. In other words, phonics teaches students the internal linguistic structure of words.

Jonathan Solity of Warwick University introduced synthetic phonics into parts of Essex, studying 10,000 children over seven years and comparing results with those produced by children following the National Literacy Strategy. In Basildon, where learning difficulties previously afflicted 25 per cent of all children, they are down to 5 per cent. "So why are all schools not teaching synthetic phonics? The short answer is, because the Government tells them not to. The teaching of reading has long been contested, with fashions for learning words by rhyme and guessing from first letters. The Government wanted the National Literacy Strategy introduced fast. They had to get everybody behind it, so there were a lot of anti-phonics people. The NLS was piloted, yet the Government decided to go ahead with it before the results were in. Only after its introduction was a report commissioned to discover the research that underpinned it" (article in The Observer, 2001).