This paper reviews some recent research on the component skills necessary to learn to read by phonic techniques. The review is divided into four sections, each relating research on one of the skills necessary for novel word decoding. The four skill areas are: (1) learning invariant grapheme-phoneme correspondences; (2) relating the isolated letter sounds to the same sounds in words; (3) dealing with variant pronunciation of graphemes; and (4) dealing with polysyllabic words on a lexical basis. A five-page bibliography is included. (Author/TO)