Our page of Mapped Words®!

Spelling isn’t as simple as ‘talking on paper’, and most children don’t speak in the way they’re taught to connect letters to sounds in synthetic phonics programmes.
 

As part of our Dys-Code® project, we’ve secured £215,875 in funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through the UKRI R&D MAP Breaking Down Barriers programme, which has invested up to £2.5 million in projects focused on earlier identification of special educational needs.

Dys-Code® Assessors are therefore taught The Word Mapping Formula and trained to map words bidirectionally.
 

What does bidirectional word mapping mean?

When reading, we start with the written word, identify the grapheme boundaries (which letters work together to represent a phoneme) and the phonemes (speech sounds) they represent.

When spelling, we start with the spoken word, identify the phonemes and determine which graphemes represent them in the conventional spelling.

But children don't necessarily pronounce words in the way assumed by the phonics programme they're taught. Nor does successfully reading a word mean they've identified and stored all its grapheme–phoneme correspondences.

And mapping words bidirectionally is not as simple as it sounds.

Adults, including teachers, can find it difficult to identify grapheme boundaries and their corresponding sound values accurately. Yet this is precisely the knowledge needed to understand what children have, and haven't, worked out about the orthographic code.

We want to find out what children know. We want to understand WHY they're struggling, what they haven't yet worked out about the orthographic code, and what they need next.

But how can adults identify gaps in a child's orthographic knowledge if they aren't confident about the code themselves?

 

That's precisely why we're training Dys-Code® Assessors in The Word Mapping Formula, so they develop the knowledge and skills to analyse children's reading and spelling, identify where their understanding of the code breaks down, and determine what support they need.

Before we can expect adults to identify what children haven't yet worked out about the code, we need to make sure those adults understand it themselves. That's what our Dys-Code® Assessor training is designed to achieve.