One of the earliest songs children learn to sing is the alphabet song – the classic “A, B, C” sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”.

So it can be easy to believe that children have learnt the alphabet at a young age, as they warble their way through all the letters, with the only problem most parents considering is whether they should be strict about pronouncing the letter Z as ‘zed’ or accepting that the horse has probably bolted and it’s just going to have to be ‘zee’.

But how many pre-school kids can actually identify the 26 individual letters that feature in the song, as opposed to knowing which noises to make as they sing? The classic example being “L, M, N, O, P”, which so many pronounce as a single, run-together word “elemenopee” (it’s been the inspiration across a range of pop culture bits and pieces, including books, movies and even a band).

Ultimately, learning the letters of the alphabet is essential. But that’s not to say it’s essential to learn all of the letters straight off the bat – and just as well, because there’s a lot to learn.

For starters, every letter can be expressed as two symbols, upper and lower case, and while some are relatively similar – o is just a smaller version of O – some letters bare almost no visually identifiable similarity – think e vs E.

So learning the 26 letters of the alphabet is actually a process of learning 52 letters. And that’s to say nothing of the added complexity of how letters change with font, such as the typed lower-case letter a compared to the way it looks when handwritten: a.

The alphabet can be a jungle!

As such, there is something of an expected order to the way in which kids learn their letters.

Generally speaking, the easiest letters to learn are those that have their sound at the start of the letter name. Think b (bee), t (tee), d (dee), j (jay) or p (pee).

More difficult are letters where the name has the sound in it but not at the start, such as f (ef), l (el), m (em), n (en) or s (es).

The most tricky are letters where there is no clear link between the letter name and its sound – y (why) or w (double-you).

While the logic here is seemingly clear – “bee for bee” is far more straightforward than “why is for yak” – as stated above, this is a generalisation. Take for example, a child named Yolanda Wild. The letters Y and W are far more likely to stick when they’re part of your name, regardless of how ‘tricky’ they might be for the majority of kids to learn.

And that’s the most important takeaway when it comes to the question of whether to teach the alphabet or how much of the alphabet a child should learn before they start their first day of school.

All children are different.

Letters or sounds? Why not both! In the 1990s, Professor Diane McGuinness made the argument that learning the alphabet should come after children are proficient with sounds, which has led to plenty of teachers and parents making heartfelt pleas on social media to “stop singing the alphabet song”, arguing that “A, B, C” is doing harm when it takes precedence over learning sounds.

The counter argument comes from the likes of Piasta et al (2012), who cite research that learning the alphabet is so important that the ability to name letters has “been asserted as the best early predictor of children’s later literacy success”. That same 2012 paper found “optimal benchmarks of 18 uppercase and 15 lowercase letter names” for children to know by the time they finish preschool.

However, knowing 18 uppercase and 15 lowercase letter names is a benchmark, not a hard and fast rule – as Piasta et al note, “meeting one specific benchmark by the end of preschool, including knowing a particular number of letter names, does not guarantee literacy success”.

Ultimately, there are two essential factors worth considering:

• Your child will have to learn the alphabet at some point
• You know your child better than any anonymised study

If a child can learn that a sheep goes “baa”, then they can probably learn that the sound “ssss” is represented by the letter S. It might require some repetition, but learning the correlation between the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they make is not an impossible ask of a preschooler.

However, if a child is struggling with the correlation, sounds should take priority over the letters of the alphabet, with the work of Roberts et al (2019) pointing “to the benefit of teaching letter sounds before letter names” in preschool children.

Just as not all kids are the same, neither are all parents. And if you’re a parent who is reading up on whether their child should be prioritising learning sounds or the alphabet, you’re showing a level of care that gives your child a completely different headstart on their reading journey – regardless of how many letters your child may have learnt by the time they start school.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Piasta SB, Petscher Y, Justice LM. How Many Letters Should Preschoolers in Public Programs Know? The Diagnostic Efficiency of Various Preschool Letter-Naming Benchmarks for Predicting First-Grade Literacy Achievement. J Educ Psychol. 2012 Nov;104(4):954-958. doi: 10.1037/a0027757. PMID: 26346643; PMCID: PMC4557803.

Roberts, TA, Vadasy, PF, & Sanders, EA (2019). Preschoolers’ Alphabet Learning: Cognitive, Teaching Sequence, and English Proficiency Influences. Reading Research Quarterly, 54(3), 413–437. doi:10.1002/rrq.242