Two new review authors have been added (Pip Eve and Huachen Wang).

The name of the institution (ARC Centre of Excellence of Cognition and its Disorders) has been updated (previously Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science).

Figure 1 of the dual route model has been removed.

We have revised the Background slightly to (1) improve clarity in general, (2) provide a clearer definition of phonics training, (3) provide a clearer explanation for why it is important to review simple phonics training programmes rather than complex programmes.

The definition of the intervention changed from "phonics training of any duration, intensity or mode of delivery, with or without concomitant training in letter identification, sight‐word reading, or phoneme awareness" to "phonics program that trained reading via the letter‐sound rules alone (phonics only) or with one other type of training (that is, a programme that combined phonics with phoneme awareness or irregular word reading)".

We modified our inclusion criteria for the intervention to include studies where the control group did the same training as the intervention group minus the phonics component (that is, phoneme awareness training or irregular word reading training).

We updated 'Types of participants' to include criteria relating to age, gender, and SES.

In the protocol for this review, we planned to calculate separate effects for accuracy for nonwords, regular words, and irregular words. We also planned to calculate separate effects for fluency for nonwords, regular words, and irregular words. However, given the paucity of data for these separate effects, this review combined measures for regular and irregular word reading accuracy into 'word reading accuracy', and combined regular and irregular word reading fluency into 'word reading fluency', to improve the power of the meta‐analyses of the reading measures.

We had also planned to include letter identification, parsing, and blending in this review. However, no studies reported data for these measures, and so they could not be included in this review.

We merged 'spoken word production' and 'other phoneme awareness abilities' into 'phonological output' since these were tested with similar measures (that is, phoneme awareness tests).

We removed Dissertation Abstract Online from 'Searching other resources' because our institution no longer subscribes to this database.

We modified the list in the 'Subgroup analysis and investigation of heterogeneity' section to accurately reflect the seven subgroup analyses planned for this review. This involved (1) removing 'reading skill' as a subgroup (since this moderator was tested by comparing primary and secondary outcomes); (2) adding training duration; (3) redefining concomitant training (letter identification, irregular words, reading fluency, reading comprehension, phoneme awareness, spoken vocabulary) to 'training type (phonics alone, phonics and phoneme awareness, phonics and irregular words). We also changed the terms slightly (for example, 'training' instead of 'treatment') for the sake of clarity.