The report, titled Unlocking the Code, serves as the final release from the Reading Reimagined initiative, a five-year project under the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF). Researchers examined the Sounds-Write program, which replaces traditional phonics rules with a speech-to-print methodology. By focusing on English orthography, students develop a mental map of sound-spelling patterns, a skill literacy experts call set for variability, which is essential for decoding complex, multisyllabic text.

Over two years, SRI tracked 400 students across nine schools. The data shows that participants receiving this structured linguistic phonics (SLP) instruction outperformed their peers in both word reading and sentence-level efficiency. Notably, these gains remained consistent among English learners and students with individualized education programs (IEPs). Teachers also reported high satisfaction, with 69% rating the SLP curriculum as more effective than previous methods. According to lead researcher Dan Reynolds, the program leverages cognitive science to help students recognize patterns, effectively demystifying the English language for older learners who have historically been left behind by standard instructional models.