Which method emphasizes the relationships between individual sounds and letters in reading?

The analytical phonics method focuses on understanding the relationships between individual sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes) as students engage in the reading process. This approach allows learners to break down words into their constituent sounds and to connect these sounds to their corresponding letters and groups of letters. By emphasizing sound-letter correspondences, analytic phonics helps students develop skills in decoding words, which is essential for reading fluency and comprehension.

This method stands in contrast to approaches such as the whole language approach, which prioritizes comprehension and meaning-making over explicit instruction in sound-letter relationships, and syllabic methods, which focus more on syllables rather than the direct connection of phonemes and graphemes. Spelling instruction, while it may incorporate phonics, is not solely centered on the relationships between sounds and letters in the way that analytic phonics is. Thus, analytic phonics serves as a foundational method for developing reading skills through systematic instruction on these critical relationships.