How We Choose and Rate Structured Literacy Programs

What gets listed

This site covers structured literacy programs that are delivered online or through an app: apps and websites your child uses, online lessons a parent leads, live online tutoring with a named curriculum, and school software. Print programs taught from a manual are not listed. To be listed, a program also has to do all three:

Teach sound–letter patterns explicitly, in a published order where each skill builds on the last.
Not teach guessing, or memorising words that can be sounded out.
Teach spelling, not just reading.

Popular apps such as Reading Eggs, Hooked on Phonics, Duolingo ABC, ABCmouse and Epic are not listed because they miss at least one of these, usually by teaching sight words to memorise, using leveled books, or leaving out spelling. Programs we could not confirm against all three are left out until we can.

1. The skill ladder: how far it goes

This is the biggest difference between products. Most apps stop around the end of second grade, which is exactly where many struggling readers get stuck. We place each app on seven steps, from the maker's published scope and sequence where one exists.

Step	Example words	Options that teach it
1. Letter sounds	m says /m/	19 of 22
2. Short-vowel words	cat, sit, hop	19 of 22
3. Blends and digraphs	stop, ship, chin	18 of 22
4. Vowel patterns	cake, rain, car	19 of 22
5. Multisyllable words	napkin, fantastic	15 of 22
6. Prefixes, suffixes and spelling rules	hopping, unkind	11 of 22
7. Latin and Greek roots	construct, phonograph	8 of 22

Each step is marked taught, partly, not taught, ornot published when the maker does not say. Practice tools and book libraries that do not teach a sequence are marked as not a phonics course rather than scored low.

2. Who hears your child read

Reading aloud with someone who corrects errors is one of the most consistently recommended practices for beginning readers. Many apps are tap-and-listen only, so nobody ever hears the child read.

Speech recognition. The app listens to your child read aloud and responds.
A trained tutor. A trained person hears every word and corrects in the moment.
You do. Your child reads to you or a teacher, who judges each word.
No automated listening. The software does not assess reading aloud; an adult can provide listening and feedback.

3. Spelling from dictation

Spelling a word you have just heard is harder, and more useful, than picking the right letters from a set. Structured literacy programs dictate words and sentences in nearly every lesson; few apps do.

Writes from dictation. Your child hears a word and produces the spelling.
Picks letters or answers. Your child chooses from options rather than producing the spelling.
No spelling. Spelling is not part of it.

4. What your child reads

Decodable books use only the patterns a child has been taught, so they practise sounding out rather than guessing. Leveled books are sorted by difficulty, not by phonics pattern, and push beginners to guess. Decodables are a stage, not forever: good programs move on to richer text once decoding is secure.

Decodable. Texts primarily follow taught patterns; see each program’s treatment of irregular words.
Decodable and leveled. Some decodable books alongside leveled ones.
AI-generated. Stories are generated; decodability is not guaranteed.
Leveled. Books sorted by reading level, not by the patterns taught.
No story library confirmed. May include word or sentence practice; see the listing for details.

5. Mastery checks and review

"Adaptive" is in almost every app description. We give credit only when the rules for moving on are written down, or when a trained person makes the call.

Mastery checks. Progress is gated by checks the child must pass.
Tutor decides. The tutor moves on only when the child has mastered a step.
Says it adapts. Adapts or places the child, but the rules are not published.
No gating. Children can move on without showing mastery.

6. How much of your time

This is about fit, not quality. A program you teach yourself can be excellent; it just needs you. We never score it up or down.

Runs by itself. Your child can use it alone.
Light check-ins. Runs by itself; you review progress.
You teach it. You sit with your child for every lesson.
Trained tutor. Delivered by a trained tutor or clinician.
Through a school. Sold to schools; families usually cannot buy it.

7. Independent evidence

We report what the evidence actually is, with the study size where we know it. Vendor badges and independent ratings often disagree, so we show both.

Independent study. At least one outcome study run or rated by someone other than the maker.
Maker’s own studies. Only studies the maker ran, paid for or wrote.
No outcome study. No outcome study we could find.

Red flags

These are practices that independent curriculum reviews and several state laws now treat as signs of weak early reading instruction. A program built on them is not listed here.

Guessing strategies: prompting children to use the picture, the first letter, or "what would make sense" to work out a word.
Memorising decodable words by sight: teaching high-frequency words as whole shapes, especially alongside the very first short-vowel words.
Leveled or predictable books for beginners in place of decodable ones.
Accepting near misses: counting "house" as correct for "home". For apps that listen, this is a speech-recognition setting.
No published sequence, or sounds pronounced with an added "uh" ("buh" for /b/).

What we deliberately do not score

"Orton-Gillingham" and "multisensory" labels. The International Dyslexia Association's 2024 definition of structured literacy no longer lists multisensory as a defining feature, and two meta-analyses (Stevens et al., 2021; Hall et al., 2023) found it did not explain differences in results. We score what an app does, not what it calls itself.
"Teaches the six syllable types." Some strong programs teach multisyllable reading without syllable types. We look for an explicit strategy for long words instead.
Vendor ESSA badges on their own. Some advertised ratings come from studies the company paid for. Where an independent database such as Evidence for ESSA disagrees, we show both.
App store stars. A 2025 review of 309 phonics apps by speech pathologists found no significant link between star ratings and educational quality.

Speech recognition

Apps that listen to children read differ in what happens on an error (pointing back to the letters is good; a picture or a plain "try again" is not), whether they accept near misses, how they handle accents and speech differences, and how long they keep recordings. We report what makers publish about each of these. We do not yet run our own recorded accuracy tests, so speech accuracy is not scored for any app, including ours.

Sources behind the method

We cite these frameworks; they do not endorse this site. Everything here was checked in October 2026.