Instruction for beginning readers is thought to be needed on several fronts, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. The National Reading Panel reviewed the findings of many experiments to determine whether there was sufficient scientific evidence to indicate the effectiveness of these forms of instruction in helping students learn to read. This paper reviews one part of their report, that involving the evidence of systematic phonics instruction. The paper states that because the writing system in English is more complex and variable than in some languages, it is harder to learn, making systematic phonics instruction even more important to teach, because children will have difficulty figuring out the system on their own. It points out that a primary goal of phonics instruction is to teach students to read words in or out of text. It explains that phonics is a method of instruction that teaches students correspondence between graphemes in written language and phonemes in spoken language and how to use these correspondences to read and spell words. It notes that phonics instruction is systematic when the major grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught and they are covered in a clearly defined sequence. According to the paper, the phonics review sought to determine whether there is experimental evidence showing that systematic phonics instruction helps children learn to read more effectively than unsystematic phonics instruction or instruction teaching little or no phonics and whether phonics instruction is more effective under some circumstances than others and for some students more than others. The paper discusses the 38 studies were reviewed in the meta analysis. Appended is a list of the 38 studies. (Contains 2 tables and 41 references.) (NKA)