A method of teaching beginners to read and pronounce words by having them relate letters to sounds.

Phonics is generally thought of as the traditional method of teaching someone how to read. Throughout the 20th century, its popularity has periodically risen and declined, but it has never been abandoned altogether. There are two main ways of incorporating phonics into the reading curriculum: the synthetic and analytic approaches. With the synthetic approach, children learn the 44 basic sounds that can be produced by the 26 letters of the English alphabet, and vocabulary words are only introduced when all the letter sounds have been mastered. Students are taught to sound out unfamiliar words one letter at a time based on their sounds. With the analytic method, students first acquire a basic vocabulary of words they know by sight and then study the relationships of letters and sounds by analyzing how they operate...