It's important to know whether that deficiency is due to a reading disorder. Learners who struggles with reading, almost always have a deficiency in the first two components of the Reading Pyramid (phonemic awareness or phonics). When we encode a word, we use our understanding of phonics to build the word.

Encoding is the exact opposite skill, which we refer to generally as spelling. When we decode a word, we are applying our understanding of phonics and the rules that English words follow to correctly pronounce or read the word. You may be wondering what we mean by decoding and encoding words. Try our phonics program! Get started for $10! › We all benefit from learning phonics and knowing how to properly decode and encode words, but for that 30%, explicit, systematic instruction in phonics/decoding/encoding is indispensable for understanding the code of English. For a majority of children, phonics skills will come easily and without much thought, but a fair number of children (roughly 30%) will struggle to understand phonics. The skills we develop during those first nine years largely have to do with phonics and how we decode or encode words. At any age after that language development period, we are using the skills we obtained in those critical years to learn, grow, and communicate with our community. This is when we learn to speak, learn to read, and begin to learn to write. The first nine years of life, until about the third grade, are critical years for language development. The Importance of Developing Phonics Skills

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words, and phonics is the ability to recognize the relationship between individual letters (graphemes) and their correlating sounds (phonemes).

Encoding in literacy