Frequently Asked Questions

Implementation can be individualized by school needs. Once teachers are trained, the program can be implemented with an entire class, in small groups and one-to-one. There are 4 phases of Readable English. Training for Phase 1 can be completed in 4-6 hours. A follow-up training for Phases 2 to 4 takes approximately 2 hours. The program is also suitable for both online and in-person instruction. Ideally, classes should be taught 5 days a week for 30-45 minutes a day. You can read more about school implementation here.

You can read the already published peer-reviewed research studies on the effectiveness of Readable English here, and we have relationships with major universities and independent researchers to continue publishing findings in peer-reviewed journals. We also collect standardized school testing data to show before and after results which you can view on our Research Results page. On average, students learning Readable English improve at twice the rate of students in control groups, for both reading accuracy and comprehension. Typically, these results can be seen as early as Phase 1 as this is where students develop phonemic awareness, phonics and orthographic mapping.

Readable English is designed so that the glyphs are removed as students become more proficient, in the way you would remove training wheels from a bicycle. In the peer-reviewed research studies that have been published, all testing is conducted in Standard English, indicating that learning Readable English leads to faster growth in reading, even once the glyphs have been removed. Through qualitative research with teachers and students, we’ve found that students actually simply ignore the glyphs for words that have been committed to memory as sight words, through orthographic mapping.

Readable English does not load the brain with another layer, in fact, it removes the need for students to learn all the current phonetic/language conventional rules and exceptions – the existing layer where the real cognitive load sits. In this way, Readable English lightens the cognitive load, making heavy load language rule and exception lessons redundant. This is why Professor John Sweller (the founder of the Cognitive Load Theory) is a public advocate of Readable English. You can watch his video testimonial or read his written endorsement.

Readable English is not a substitute for the good practices that teachers implement, such as structured synthetic phonics programs. However, where other phonics programs fail to address “tricky words” such as ‘who’, ‘though’ and ‘yacht’, Readable English builds a pronunciation guide right into the word eliminating the need for memorization. We’ve found that the addition of the markup does not conflict with most phonics-based approaches, in that the spelling is kept intact and it simply provides an extra visual cue that aligns with the rules students already know.

Many phonics programs denote the difference between sounds using italics or underlines, for example, a regular ‘oo’ for ‘boot’ and ‘th’ for ‘thumb’ and an underlined or italicized ‘oo’ for ‘book’ and ‘th’ for ‘them’. Readable English goes a step further by adding diacritical marks called ‘glyphs’ to ANY letters that do not make their standard sound, such as in ‘blood’ and ‘brooch’.

While to a proficient reader English may seem fairly phonetic, in reality, it is very complex. In just the 1,000 most common words, approximately:

• Only 38% are truly phonetic, meaning they can be sounded out with standard letter and digraph sounds. These include words like ‘can’, ‘list’, and ‘long’.

• 35% follow one of 45 phonetic rules. Some of the basic rules include the ‘final e’ rule in words like ‘time’ and make’ and the 2 vowels go walking rule in words like ‘speak’ and ‘sail’.

• 27% are exceptions to rules or simply need to be memorized. Exceptions to rules include words like ‘have’, ‘gone’, ‘break’ and ‘said’. And words that simply need to be memorized include words like ‘one’, ‘who’ and ‘ocean’’.

For learners, all this overloads their cognitive capacity. You can read more about how complex the English language is in our free ebook download here.

The program is ideal for struggling readers, Special Education students,  Multilingual Learners and students with dyslexia. However, all students in grades 2-12 can benefit from being able to access content at their own grade level and above.

Schedule a consultation to further explore if Readable English is right for your students and school. To purchase Readable English for tutoring or homeschooling use, go to Order Now.

Yes. The Readable English online platform allows teachers to teach in-person or online with pre-made lesson presentations that need no prep time. With the share screen function, and interactive games and videos, the presentation slides keep the program highly engaging and effective. Since all lessons work in either setting, teachers do not miss a session of reading if students are at home. Because of this flexibility, the scenarios can vary by need. Teachers can use the online platform to teach large groups, small groups, or one-to-one. Teachers who have been teaching online are reporting that their students are making as much progress as in-person classes.

A core component of the Readable English program is the ability for teachers to convert any texts or classroom materials into Readable English. The conversion tools wihtin the learning portal enable teachers to instantly convert text or upload whole documents to be converted. You can watch a video about this on YouTube. Browser extensions for Chrome and Safari are also available which enable text on any web pages to be instantly converted into Readable English. We also provide a number of reading practice materials through the learning portal, such as the Reading Practice Module.

The purpose of the RE End of Year Process is to reset student and teacher accounts for the start of a new school year. If students are continuing with Readable English into a second year, the end of year process ensures the content within the learning portal is adjusted to the new grade level. The RE End of Year Process takes place over approximately one week during the summer break, around the 4th of July. 

Readable English can be used in any classroom setting. For details on hardware requirements, data sharing, training, support, data accessibility, and data security, please reference our Readable English Technology Specifications.