Speaking up for so-called silent letters. Let's give them a voice and avoid any confusion. If we are listening for sounds and mapping them to graphemes, then ignoring letters doesn't add up. Give every letter a job.   

THE WORD ‘SOME’: DO AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS ALIGN?
 

The Australian Curriculum states that students “apply their knowledge of phonemes and graphemes to decode words”, while the National Literacy Learning Progression states that “a phoneme is a spoken sound and a grapheme is the letter or group of letters that represent each phoneme” (ACARA, National Literacy Learning Progression; Australian Curriculum: English, Version 9.0).

This raises an important question when mapping words containing so-called ‘silent’ letters.

In England, this issue has been resolved within Department for Education guidance by treating letters together as graphemes where they represent a phoneme, rather than necessarily leaving a ‘silent’ letter outside the mapping. Following that analysis, the word ‘some’, with the phonemes /s/ /ʌ/ /m/, would be mapped:

‹s› ‹o› ‹me›
 

The Department for Education's Reading Framework states that the number of graphemes in a word usually corresponds to the number of phonemes and describes a grapheme as one or more letters representing a phoneme (Department for Education, 2023).

We are asking Australian education departments to clarify whether they expect teachers to apply the same principle. Should ‘some’ be mapped as ‹s› ‹o› ‹me›, so that every letter is accounted for within the phoneme–grapheme mapping? If not, what mapping is expected, and what is the rationale for the difference?

WHY THIS MATTERS

In developing the Ortho-GraphiX® word-mapping algorithm, we have found that virtually every English word a child is likely to encounter in a dictionary can be mapped using the same simple formula: identify the phonemes and map them to the graphemes. Nothing needs to be left over.

There are interesting cases to discuss. Sometimes one grapheme represents two phonemes. In ‘luxury’, for example, ‹x› represents /k/ + /ʃ/ in the pronunciation being mapped. Sometimes the schwa is ‘swallowed’. In ‘petal’ /p ɛ t ə l/ and ‘kettle’ /k ɛ t ə l/, there are five phonemes in each. In ‘petal’, the schwa /ə/ has a grapheme, ‹a›, to map to; in ‘kettle’, the schwa /ə/ does not have a separate grapheme to map to. These are features of the code that can be explained while retaining the same underlying mapping principle.
 

There are also genuine anomalies. ‘One’ and ‘once’ are the two words we have identified that cannot be mapped straightforwardly using the usual phoneme–grapheme formula. In these words, ‹o› would need to account for /w/ + /ʌ/, a correspondence we do not find elsewhere. They are exceptions precisely because the same formula works across the rest of the code.

So why identify the phonemes in a word and then stop short of mapping them consistently to graphemes?

Take ‘obstacle’. If the phonemes are identified, the graphemes can also be identified:

‹o› ‹b› ‹s› ‹t› ‹a› ‹c› ‹le›

This is not intended to replace morphology, etymology or wider word study. It answers a much more fundamental question: how can we give a five-year-old a simple, logical formula for understanding how spoken words connect with written words?

Listen for the sounds. Map them to the graphemes. Give every letter a job.

START WITH THE SPOKEN WORD

Where a child does not yet know the written word or the GPCs within it, it can be easier to start with the spoken word.

If we tell a child that the word is ‘some’, they can listen to /s/ /ʌ/ /m/ and map those phonemes to the graphemes:

‹s› ‹o› ‹me›

If we show them the written word ‘some’ without first providing the pronunciation, they have a different problem to solve. They may attempt to decode it using the GPCs they already know and generate a pronunciation that does not initially match the word they know.

Reading research describes mechanisms that help children resolve this, including partial decoding and set for variability. In a sentence such as ‘He had some apples’, many children will use their existing alphabetic knowledge, phonemic awareness and context to identify the intended word and learn from the encounter. This is part of the process through which children become increasingly independent word learners.

But not every child does this easily.

For children who need more support, the adults around them need a consistent, logical way to show the code rather than adding another layer of information to remember: this letter is silent, this one does not count, this word is unusual, this is an exception.

Every GPC a child has not yet learned is unfamiliar to that child. Labelling the spelling ‘unusual’ or 'tricky' or 'an exception' does not tell them how it maps.

A phonetic symbol can also be useful for ADULTS because it makes the phonological side of the mapping explicit. The teacher can see the phoneme and the grapheme representing it without having to infer the sound from the spelling they are trying to understand.

But what about the children?

We advocate for speech sound symbols that can be used in place of IPA phonetic symbols but serve the same purpose: making the phonemes visible, in a form a five-year-old can understand. This means children can see both sides of the mapping: the speech sounds in the spoken word and the graphemes that represent them in the written word.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

Our starting principle is deliberately simple and reflects changes made by the Department for Education in England:
 

PRINT → SPEECH

In reading, pupils are taught to decode by identifying graphemes in written words from left to right, saying the corresponding phonemes, and blending those phonemes to say the whole word (Department for Education, England, 2023, p. 47).

That requires teachers to know:

Which letters form the graphemes?
How many graphemes?
Which phoneme value does each represent?


SPEECH → PRINT
In spelling, pupils are taught to say a word clearly, segment it into phonemes, and select graphemes to represent each phoneme in writing (Department for Education, England, Writing Framework, 2025, p. 41).

That requires teachers to know:

Which phonemes?
How many phonemes?
Which graphemes represent them?

When it is a new word we recommend that teachers TELL the child the word first. Then map it. Then do an activity to store it in the orthographic lexicon (bonding speech sounds, spelling and meaning) When the child is first told the word they can map it in their accent. 

There is logic in telling children to account for every letter.

"Give every letter a job".

If Australian education departments expect a different approach, we want to understand what that approach is and why.

This is about establishing the phonological-orthographic mapping teachers are expected to apply.
 

If the expectation is not to map phonemes and graphemes as consistently, and as close to one phoneme to one grapheme as the orthography allows, we want to understand the rationale.

We are asking on behalf of the children who need the adults around them to make the alphabetic code as simple, consistent, mathematical and logical as possible.

This clarification is also necessary if teachers, training, assessment and word-mapping technology are to work from the same consistent phonological-orthographic mapping guidance.