Successful language use in adolescence and adulthood starts in preschool with lots of speaking and listening, and then in primary school we put up the "walls" of what Prof Pamela Snow calls the Language House (see [ Ссылка ]). Key building blocks that can be under-done or missing from the walls of this house are awareness of speech sounds (phonemic awareness), how these sounds are represented by letters and letter combinations (orthography), and how we build words from meaningful parts (morphology). Sometimes the habits of weak readers - guessing and memorising words - are taught instead of, or alongside, these vital building blocks, and undermine them. The Spelfabet website (www.spelfabet.com.au) aims to promote teaching and intervention based on scientific evidence about the best way to help learners build their language house by including knowledge of words' sounds, spellings and meaningful parts.
