Speedie Readies: Show the Code! The new tutor course is located at SpeedieReadies.com. Also a great way for parents to support their children at home.
Speedie Readies Pilot Overiew
Speedie Readies: Show the Code. The Dual Route to Word Mapping Mastery.
Speedie Readies Pilot Summary
Purpose
The Speedie Readies pilot is designed for the prevention of the phonics or dyslexia intervention.
It aims to prevent the dyslexia paradox, where children who are clearly at risk are not supported until they have already begun to fail at reading and are struggling with spelling.
This pilot provides early, meaningful support that strengthens the foundational skills needed for reading success, particularly phonemic awareness and phonological working memory, before reading failure occurs.
A key purpose is to find out whether strong results can be achieved when the intervention is delivered by a teaching assistant, ensuring no additional workload for the class teacher. The project also examines whether this approach helps to empower TAs and make them more confident in supporting early literacy development.
It is an initial pilot designed to identify, through real-world use, what works well and what could be improved following feedback. The goal is to create a Speedie Readies system that can be used in any Reception class from Term 2 onwards, supporting children selected by the teacher for targeted word mapping practice. A dual-route is used. The Code is Shown.
Focus of the Pilot
The pilot explores how young children respond to short, daily sessions that make the speech-to-print code visible through speech sound mapping and technology-based encoding and decoding activities.
Phonemic awareness does not always develop naturally in the same way as speech and oral language, and often requires explicit teaching. Learners who have weak phonemic awareness skills will struggle to master phonics, and poor phonemic awareness is a well-established contributor to dyslexia (Furnes et al., 2019). Research shows that children with specific language impairment or a family history of dyslexia may require more frequent exposure and practice with phonemic awareness activities in order to reach the same level of skill as their peers.
The phonemic awareness skills of segmenting and blending are particularly critical. Phonemic awareness has the greatest impact on word reading when it is combined with instruction about the letters that represent phonemes. It is therefore important to provide opportunities for children to apply their letter knowledge alongside their blending and segmenting skills within reading and writing activities (Brady, 2020).
Two activities within the pilot are designed to meet these goals. Findings from the National Reading Panel report (2000) indicate that the effects of teaching phoneme awareness are twice as large in small-group instruction compared with whole-class teaching. Small-group or individual sessions therefore provide the most effective structure to ensure that all children gain mastery of what is being taught.
Each participating school identifies one to five children in Reception or Year 1 who may be at risk because of speech, language, or literacy challenges, or who would benefit from additional confidence-building support. Sessions are delivered by teaching assistants, supported remotely through daily contact, and are designed to complement existing phonics instruction rather than replace it. All will have participated in whole class phonics instruction for at least one term.
Data Collection
The data gathered will be primarily qualitative, focusing on the impact of early, structured, technology-assisted intervention on both children and staff.
We are collecting information on:
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Child response and engagement: whether children enjoy the activities, participate willingly, and gain confidence in speaking, reading, spelling, and letter formation.
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TA experience: whether teaching assistants feel confident, empowered, and supported in delivering the activities.
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Teacher observations: whether classroom teachers notice improvements in confidence, engagement, or classroom participation.
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Technology usage data:
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Progress through the Spelling Piano app, which is organised into four code levels representing around 100 grapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs), the same correspondences tested in the Phonics Screening Check (PSC).
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Use of the orthographically mapped books that accompany the MyWordz® app, including which book or books each child is working on each week.
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Patterns of improvement in reading and spelling high-frequency words.
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Tracking of GPC mastery, showing which correspondences children become confident with for both encoding (spelling) and decoding (reading).
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Why This Matters
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By combining qualitative observation with app-based usage data, the pilot provides an early picture of how children attend to, process, and recall speech sounds. These skills depend on phonemic awareness and phonological working memory.
The Speedie Readies approach is grounded in the Dual Route to Word Mapping Mastery®, which reflects how children move toward orthographic mapping, the point at which words become stored for instant recognition. The dual route involves movement in both directions: from sound to print, supported by Phonemies® to make speech–sound values visible, and from print to sound, through systematic blending of graphemes.
These routes align with established models such as the Dual Route Cascaded model (Coltheart et al., 2001) and theories of orthographic mapping (Ehri, 2005) and self-teaching (Share, 1995). Synthetic phonics focuses mainly on the print-to-sound route, but not all children make the transition from taught decoding to self-teaching. The Speedie Readies pilot addresses this by making the full code visible from the outset, so that both routes are strengthened in parallel.
The aim is to determine whether teaching assistants can deliver effective, early literacy support that prevents the need for later, more intensive intervention. By enabling children to work bidirectionally between speech and print, they gain the tools needed to reach Word Mapping Mastery®, where decoding and encoding operate automatically and fluently.
A further aim is for children to feel confident enough in using the MyWordz® technology that they can apply it independently in the classroom. When unsure how to spell a word while writing, they can use the app to see the grapho-phonemic structure and understand how letters and sounds connect. The same tool can also be used to decode any unfamiliar word, allowing children to check both structure and pronunciation for themselves.
Through this process, Speedie Readies supports movement toward orthographic learning, fluency, and comprehension, reducing cognitive load and preventing the dyslexia paradox by ensuring all learners can access both pathways to literacy from the beginning.
How Speedie Readies Prevents the Dyslexia Paradox
The Dual Route to Word Mapping Mastery®
The Dual Route to Word Mapping Mastery®
This concept represents the journey children take toward orthographic mapping, the point at which words become stored for instant recognition. The dual route involves movement in both directions: from sound to print, supported by Phonemies® to make speech–sound values visible, and from print to sound, through systematic blending of graphemes. These routes align with established reading models that distinguish between sublexical (print-to-speech) and lexical (whole-word) processing, such as the Dual Route Cascaded model (Coltheart et al., 2001). Synthetic phonics provides a valuable kick-start to this process, focusing primarily on the sublexical route by teaching children to convert graphemes to phonemes. However, some learners do not make the leap from this taught decoding stage to self-teaching, where they begin to build and consolidate orthographic representations. Word Mapping Mastery® describes the end point of this progression, where both routes converge and the child can move seamlessly between sound and print.
Reaching Word Mapping Mastery® matters because it marks the point at which cognitive resources can be redirected from decoding individual words to comprehending text. According to orthographic mapping theory (Ehri, 2005) and the self-teaching hypothesis (Share, 1995), fluency develops when readers can rapidly and automatically recognise familiar words, allowing working memory to focus on meaning rather than form. When children are still devoting effort to single-word mapping, comprehension is constrained because cognitive load remains high. Achieving automaticity through stored orthographic representations enables fluent reading, which is vital for understanding connected text (Perfetti, 2007). It also matters that children experience mapping from speech to print as well as from print to speech. By approaching words through their spoken forms, they are exposed to a wider vocabulary and can link more of their existing oral lexicon to written forms. This bidirectional mapping increases lexical exposure, strengthens phonological, orthographic, and semantic connections, and ultimately deepens comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014).
While models such as those proposed by Coltheart, Ehri, and Share describe how skilled reading develops, they rely on children reaching self-teaching and orthographic mapping through experience. The Word Mapping Mastery® approach via Speedie Readies differs in that it does not wait for this to occur naturally. Instead, it makes the full code visible from the start, showing all grapheme–phoneme relationships across words. By making both directions of the mapping process explicit, it enables all learners, including those who struggle with speech, phonological awareness, or conventional phonics instruction, to access the self-teaching phase and achieve orthographic learning. We leave nothing to chance. We prevent the dyslexia paradox.
References
Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108(1), 204–256. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.1.204
Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167–188. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr0902_4
Perfetti, C. A. (2007). Reading ability: Lexical quality to comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 11(4), 357–383. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888430701530730
Perfetti, C. A., & Stafura, J. (2014). Word knowledge in a theory of reading comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 22–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.827687
Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151–218. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(94)00645-2
The Dual Route to Word Mapping Mastery®
