Introducing Teaching Analogy Phonics!

There are three evidence-based approaches for teaching English letter-sound patterns or phonics to children and adults: synthetic (combining different patterns), analytic (separating into patterns), and analogy (comparing similar patterns). Synthetic is most common and used in most published instructional materials. Analytic is less common but can be a valuable practice activity. Analogy, dating back to American colonial times, teaches decodable “chunks”, which can be generalized to many other words.

Teaching Analogy Phonics (TAP), a new and FREE alphabetics resource from ATLAS, provides ABE/ESL reading teachers and tutors with convincing background information and testimonials, a lesson plan model and template, other reinforcement ideas, and many (over 100!) common or sequential phonogram and word family lists for immediate analogy phonics instruction.

The developer is Marn Frank, Literacy & STAR (STudent Achievement in Reading) Coordinator. Between January and April of 2015, she enlisted a small group of MN ABE/ESL reading teachers to pilot Teaching Analogy Phonics. Here are a few of their stories of success:

• “My students have had strokes…One student rarely expresses emotion and her language is limited. We had completed a bingo activity, where they filled in a blank card with the word families we studied. At the end of the lesson, she said: Boy that was FUN!” (Lori Leininger)
• “I introduced two new word families a week and was encouraged to see students become more intentional in their pronunciation…” (Erin Evans)
• “We have been working with word families as part of our weekly story. The word earthquake came up in passing. After we talked about what it means, I realized that we worked with -ake recently. The students remembered and recognized the word family. It was a really neat ‘pieces coming together’ moment.” (Ellie Purdy)

Teaching Analogy Phonics is posted in the ATLAS Reading Resource Library under Alphabetics.

Questions? Contact Marn Frank at [email protected]