Phonics is based on a teacher-centred approach; it. It enables children to make a relationship between sounds and letters (Chapman et al., 2018). Synthetic phonics is a model of teaching children to segment and blend words without the need to always understand the meaning (Jamaludin et al., 2016),(appendix 2, p. 3, l.3). According to Kuhn et al. (2006), enhancing the phonemic awareness of the children resulted in thea significant improvement ofin their reading; if. If a child becomesis able to decode a text easily, it means then thatthat they cancan then focus almost entirely on comprehension. Phonemic awareness is a great tool for teaching children to become independent readers (Bruce & Spratt, 2011). However, Clark, (2017) argued that there is no evidence to support that phonics/ synthetic phonics is the best reading strategy. This statement is in conformity with official statistics that show that thirdone-third of children who failed the phonics check by the end of year 2 in 2014 went on to reachachieve the expected standards in reading by the end of primary education (Dfe, 2018). In the light of this, phonics is relative and assessing children at a certain age is counterproductive. Not all children learn to read at the same pace according to Gesell's maturation theory, which states that development depends on maturation (Saracho, 2017). For Gesell, any type of instruction that is introduced early on would only disappoint the children who were not yet ‘ready’ to read (Ibid). Furthermore, the sole use of the synthetic approach marginalises the place of literature (Wyse et al., 2016), hinders reading progress, since English is an irregular language (Appendix, p.3, l.6-8), and restricts teachers’ pedagogy and flexibility. Yet, phonicsPhonics can also undermine children's confidence in their abilities as well as their aspirations in life, and according to Maslow, self esteemself-esteem is important for self actualisationself-actualisation (Perrera, n.d.).