The irregularity of English spelling rules, dialect differences, and an inability to identify sound segments within a single syllable are three important reasons teachers and students have difficulty teaching and learning reading using phonics. Within the same language, phonics rules may need to be adapted to fit the dialect of the student or of the teacher. Also, most sequences of sounds are not distinct sounds but are blends and sounds affected by their neighboring sounds. This is as true of consonant-vowel or vowel-consonant sequences as it is of consonant-consonant sequences. Although an adult native speaker of a language may be conscious of utterances as strings of discrete segments of sound, the phonetic reality is a continuous stream of sound in which it is not often possible to find breaks or dividing lines between one sound and another. Programs that teach decoding rules in terms of whole syllables avoid the problems children may have in consciously analyzing syllables into abstract segments. (TJ)