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Analytic Phonics Approach

The analytic phonics approach is more fun, as is often the case. As an adult, you’re probably familiar
with other words that incorporate {ortho}. I’m thinking orthodontist, orthotics, and orthopedics. I
already know how to pronounce {ortho}, but thinking of analogous terms helps me crack the meaning.
All of the terms orthodontist, orthotics, and orthopedics, refer to straightening things out, be they
teeth, feet, or joints. The {graphy} part is even more common, appearing in ethnography (writing
about race), graphite (pencil lead), biography (writing about one’s life), grapheme (written
representation of a phoneme), and autograph (signing one’s own name). We again get “straight
writing,” or “correct spelling.”

By explicitly teaching the correct spelling of words—particularly irregular words—you’re building the
students’ awareness of spelling conventions. When used in combination with morphology and
etymology, the students’ opportunities for “getting it” are exponentially increased.

Sight Words
The inspiration behind many of Dr. Seuss’s books was the objective of writing books that used a
limited vocabulary of short, decodable words in anticipatable, rhyming stories. Even in novels for
adults, a surprisingly significant percentage of the words are among the one hundred or so most
common words in the English language.

Directly teaching students to recognize many of these frequently used words brings a two-fold benefit:
it quickens the pace of reading and eases the sounding out process in the case of words that are
often difficult for children to sound out.

Automaticity with regard to the most common words helps move a reader along at a quicker pace.
Getting from the initial capital at the beginning of a sentence to the period at the end can be a slow
struggle. If the student is not spending valuable time trying to figure out words like if, the, is, not, to, and,
and out, then he or she will finish the sentence with some idea of what the key words in the sentence
were trying to communicate.

The secondary reason for drilling (that’s not always a bad word) students on sight words is that many
such words do not lend themselves to being sounded out. For example, of can reasonably be
decoded as “off.” The word to all too easily could become “toe.” Some kids would naturally assume
that one is “own” and that sure is “sewer.”

The quick-and-dirty analogy goes like this: If I were not able to type with automaticity, I would use too
much of my brain power simply trying to find the keys on the keyboard. Equipped with some
keyboarding skill, however, I can concentrate on the subject matter and won’t be tempted to
shortchange you, dear reader, by being overly parsimonious with the analogies. Appropriate drilling,
then, is an investment in skills that will permit students to perform simple addition, subtraction,
multiplication, division, decoding, and sight reading without obscuring higher-order objectives.