And what about “phonics”?

Phonics is a system for teaching English-speaking children how to read and write using conventional spelling. Phonics was the way I learned how to read English when I was a little boy: how, now, brown, cow. I could already speak English. Nobody needed to teach me how to say the sounds of English. They did not push it too far, English spelling being so irregular. And I soon learnt to recognise the words in books immediately. Looking back on it, learning written English is a bit like learning Chinese: “look and say” is really the only way. It could even be argued that the open-minded intelligent child will soon notice that English spelling is silly and that phonics is a bit of a sham, resulting in it viewing teachers with distrust.

Phonetics is not the same thing at all. It offers a way of representing the sounds of a language with corresponding special symbols, in a similar manner to that by which music can be represented with a set of notes.  Simplified Standard Sound Symbols (S4) is a set of such symbols just for the sounds of ,mainstream, American and British English It is "phonemic" in that each of its symbols represents a sound that needs to be distinguished from another one in the set to convey meaning as, for instance, in the case of 'ship' and 'sheep'. It is a complete system that provides the EFL teacher with a reliable and logical framework for teaching students to accurately say and recognise the sounds of English.