Analytical phonics teaches reading by first memorizing sight words, then analyzing their phonetic structure. It differs from linguistic and synthetic phonics by starting with stories and working down to individual letters. Students analyze phonetics to recognize letter combinations and pronounce new words. Linguistic phonics focuses on sound patterns, while synthetic phonics teaches individual letter sounds and combines them to form words.
Analytical phonics is a method of teaching reading based first on memorizing sight words, then on analyzing the phonetic structure of those sight words. It differs from other popular phonetic approaches, such as linguistic phonetics or synthetic phonetics mainly in the “top-down” approach. That means it starts with authentic stories, then works its way down to words and individual letters or phonetic units. Analytical Phonetics is often used as part of an entire language curriculum.
Whole language approaches to teaching reading begin with a teacher reading fiction or non-fiction stories to students as they tutor. Students then learn to recognize sight words without necessarily being able to sound out new words, because they don’t have much knowledge of phonetics, which is how letters correspond to the sounds of words. Analytical phonetics is a way to address this gap throughout the language by having students analyze the phonetics of words they already know.
Generally, an analytical phonics lesson will involve the teacher showing students sets of words that have some letter or combination of letters in common, such as “sound”, “flour” and “cloud”. The teacher guides the students to discover how sounds and letters are related. In this case, the “ou” in all three words sounds like “ow.” Once students can recognize the letter combinations that make up words they already know, they will be able to pronounce other words they have never encountered before.
Analytical phonetics is comparable to linguistic phonetics in that both focus on sound patterns within words rather than individual letter sounds, but linguistic phonetics relies less on the use of sight words gained from reading. Students learn to read groups of words that all contain similar patterns, such as “king,” “ring,” and “sing.” They might then be given a reading task that uses these and other similarly structured words. Proponents of the top-down approach might criticize this method because it uses artificial and therefore usually uninteresting texts.
Synthetic phonetics is almost the exact opposite of analytical phonetics. While Analytical Phonetics starts with whole stories and boils down to individual sounds, Synthetic Phonetics takes a bottom-up approach by teaching students to recognize the sounds of individual letters. These sounds are then combined, or synthesized, to form words. Synthetic phonics teaches reading and spelling with writing simultaneously, in contrast to analytic phonics which emphasizes reading first and then moves on to spelling and writing.
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