[eal-bilingual] Article re literacy in early years

Re Ruth Devlin's post - many of these points concern issues of language 
development, rather than the most effective ways of teaching someone to read 
in English. Her example "My mum" contains not one concept, but two - "mum 
and my", rather than "mum and your. No one is suggesting that phonics works 
all the time in English, or that learning a new language is not very 
demanding. But the alphabetic system is based on representing sounds by 
means of letters, and I know of no evidence to indicate that this process 
can be effectively taught other than through phonics. JohnBald 