Teaching letter sound relationships in context is systematic

While it is acknowledged that mastery of constrained literacy skills is a predictor of later literacy proficiency, Paris (2005) observes that no research has found it to be a causal relationship. That is, no correlation exists between early mastery of skills such as phonic knowledge and later literacy achievement. Of course, mastery of the constrained skills is necessary, but only in that it allows us to develop increasingly unconstrained, complex and contextualised skills for living rich literate lives.