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We have identified about 45 units that are both frequent and consistent, at least 90% consistent. These units are arranged by lesson and taught in conjunction with consonants and selected whole words. In the first lesson for example, the learner is taught the sounds for the consonants "m" and "r", the units "ail", "an", and "ay", and the whole words "is" and "the". Two types of whole words are taught in the CRP. 1) Words that occur frequently in our language and have no useful parts for "sounding out", e.g. "the", "that", "this", and 2) Words that contain rare pronunciations of otherwise useful units. The word "been", for example, contains a very rare pronunciation of the unit "ee" a very frequent and consistent unit. Since we do not want the learner to erroneously conclude that the bigram "ee" is usually pronounced as in "been", the word "been" is never broken down into parts, but is taught as an entity.

By combining the consonants and units presented in Lesson 1, the learner can read the words "mail", "man", "may", "rail", "ran", "ray", "mailman", and "rayman", in addition to the whole words "is" and "the". Many beginning readers master the material in Lesson 1 after 15 to 20 minutes of study, even if they were unable to read anything before beginning the lesson. Thus after a few minutes of instruction, they have a reading vocabulary of 10 words and are able to read a story about "Ray the Mailman." In Lesson 2 the consonant "s" is introduced with the units "ake" and "ing" and the whole words "in" and "with". This increases the learner's reading vocabulary to over 40 words. By adding one consonant and two units in each succeeding lesson, the learner's reading vocabulary soon becomes quite extensive.

We have written another computer program that searches the 46,000 word list by lesson and lists the words that can be generated from the given letters and units. For example by Lesson 5, 208 words can be generated from the six letters and eleven units taught in the first five lessons. Since the learner can "figure out" each of these words completely by combining the letters and units taught thus far in the CRP, we call them "completely decodable" words or just CD Minus-Zero words or just CD-0.

In addition there are many words that can be read except for one letter. For example after Lesson 2, since the unit "ay" and the consonant "w" have been taught, the word "away" is decodable except for the initial vowel "a". Because this is a word that is completely decodable except for one letter, we call it a "completely-decodable-minus-one word" or just a "CD minus one word" or just CD-1. For example by Lesson 5 there are 395 completely-decodable-minus-one (CD-1) words. Table 4 lists the number of completely-decodable and completely decodable- minus-one words for selected lessons.

The power of the program is quite apparent. After a few lessons, the learner can read some fairly large words, like "entertainment", "entertaining", etc. And after learning only about 70 stimuli (the consonants, their blends/digraphs, and 42 units) learners are able to read over 5500 words from the 46,000 word list. In addition they are able to read over 13,000 more words except for one letter. Thus over 18,800 of the words are either completely decodable or decodable except for one letter by Lesson 20.