explicit instruction plus guided practice is the most efficient way of teaching students how to map the forty-odd phonemes of English onto the twenty-six letters of the alphabet in some hundred-plus ways. The superiority of an explicit, analytical method in this case has been amply shown.25 And there are many other examples of the superior efficiency of explicit, focused instruction. How astonishing, then, if it should turn out that the most efficient way of learning thousands of word meanings is through an unconscious, automatic, and implicit process. Yet the weight of evidence indicates it
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