Analytic Approach

The analytic approach (also called Whole Word approach) should be used when students have a small sight word vocabulary. The analytic approach is a whole-to-part approach that teaches students how to recognize similarities in words.

With this approach, words that contain the same letter/sound are read and students are asked to explain what is similar about all of the words.  The students can then be instructed to apply the resulting generalization to recognize similar sounds in additional words.

For example: A teacher could  read the list — big, bone, baby, and bug and ask the class to listen to how each word begins with the “b” sound. The students can then be asked to look at the beginning of each word to see what they notice. At least one of the students should notice that all of the words begin with the letter “b.” The teacher can lead them to form the generalization that the letter b represents /b/ (the sound). With a little more instruction the students should be able to apply the generalization to other words containing the letter "b."