The Talking Fingers approach to literacy is based on a simple idea: text is speech made visible. We use our mouths to talk, to make the sounds of words. We use our fingers (with a pencil or keyboard) to represent those sounds on paper. There are 40 sounds (or phonemes) in English. It takes only 26 letters to stand for those sounds, to make any spoken word visible. When children learn to link those sounds and letters, they can use the alphabet code to write any word they can say. Their fingers are "talking".