This thesis proposes the use of a modified phonics program to teach students basic rules that will help them to translate graphemes to phonemes in both words they are familiar with and words they are not. It is a common misconception that English has a highly irregular or irrational orthography. Quite to the contrary, English, as a morphophonenic language, has a highly regular orthography governed by systematic rules and spelling patterns that correspond to phonemes in speech. We argue that a knowledge of these rules give students the necessary tools to move from grapheme to phoneme. This also increases their confidence, develops their metacognitive awareness and produces autonomous learners whose pronunciation and communication will improve because of knowledge of how English works and relates writing to speaking.