Joyce Morris, who has died aged 93, was a tireless worker for the better teaching and learning of literacy. She influenced generations of children through her input to the pioneering BBC television series Look and Read (first broadcast in 1967) and Words and Pictures (from 1970), and her Language in Action series of initial reading books (1974-83). Both were informed by her analysis of the phonetics of English – a system that she dubbed Phonics 44, published in 1984 but devised much earlier – and by a keen appreciation of how to make reading appealing to young children.
Joyce argued that English orthography is highly patterned. Only a relatively small proportion of words diverge completely from conventional patterns. The vast majority of words can be recognised and spelled by applying the alphabetic principle of phoneme-grapheme correspondence and a knowledge of the statistical probability of sound-symbol relationships in English.
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