Literacy, the ability to read and write, is the first and foremost duty of systems of education both in L1 and L2. The key to the realm of literacy is the knowledge and skill of the alphabet. There have been various approaches and methods for teaching literacy or the alphabetic skill throughout the history of education in the West, and approaches such as whole language, language experience, literature-based, whole word, alphabetic, and phonics have been proposed and tested in a pendulum manner. The long debates between these approaches, or the Reading Wars, seem to have moved towards a general agreement that a part-to-whole synthetic phonics approach is a better solution for developing the decoding skills needed at the initial stages of literacy. But the point is that most of the debates and research have occurred in the L1 Western context, and initial literacy has received little theoretical or experimental attention in foreign language contexts in general and the Iranian EFL context in particular. The peculiarities of the Iranian context, such as beginning English literacy at an age when learners are teenagers who already master literacy in their L1, indicate that it deserves attention from the Iranian ELT academia. Feeling this need, this paper attempts to review the most important debates and approaches to teaching literacy, to sensitize the Iranian academia to the issue, and, even more importantly, to respond to an important demand of Iranian English teachers by suggesting a localized synthetic phonics approach to teaching literacy at schools.