The writing system for the English language is alphabetic. Because a series oftwenty-six letters has been created to represent the speech sounds of the lan-guage, our thoughts and ideas can be written down. To become literate, wemust learn the relationship between letters and speech sounds. Chapter 3 pre-sented techniques for teaching the nature and purpose of writing and reading,concepts of print, the alphabet, awareness of speech sounds, and a techniquefor presenting initial consonants. These techniques form a foundation for learn-ing phonics, which is the relationship between spelling and speech sounds asapplied to reading. This chapter covers high-frequency words, some of whichmay not lend themselves to phonic analysis. In addition, the chapter exploressyllabic analysis, which is applying phonics to multisyllabic words, and fluency,which is freedom from word identification problems. This chapter will be momeaningful if you first reflect on what you already know about phonics, syllabicanalysis, and fluency.Think about how you use phonics and syllabic analysis to sound out strangenames and other unfamiliar words. Think about how you might teach phonics,and ask yourself what role phonics should play in a reading program.141
How words are read?
Words are read in one of four, often overlapping, ways. They are predicted,sounded out, chunked, or recognized immediately. Predicting means using contextby itself or context plus some decoding to read a word. Seeing the letter w and usingthe context “Sam was pulling a red w ____ ,” the student predicts that the wordmissing is wagon. Sounding out entails pronouncing words letter by letter or soundby sound (/h/ + /a/ + /t/) and then blending them into a word. As readers becomemore advanced, they group or chunk sounds into pronounceable units (/h/ + /at/).In the fourth process, the words are recognized with virtually no mental effort. Adeptreaders have met some words so often that they recognize them just about as soonas they see them. These are called sight words because they are apparently recog-nized at sight (Ehri & McCormick, 1998).
