A very similar approach has been referred to as the "linguistic approach" which introduces word families such as "at" in "cat", "fat", "rat", etc., and "in" in "bin", "din", "fin", etc. But linguistic elements such as "at" and "in" are not consistent. In a computer analysis of our language, we found that the bigram "at" occurred 1665 times in the most frequently occurring 18,000 words and is pronounced as in"cat" in fewer than 15% of those words. Thus those who teach a learner "at", as a word part or unit that is pronounced as in "cat", are teaching that learner to be wrong in over 85% of the words in our language. Similarly, the bigram "in" is not consistently pronounced as in "bin". In fact over half of the occurrences of "in" are in "ing.". While teaching word parts can be a very effective approach to teaching reading, determining which parts to teach is crucial!

Click here to go to the beginning of this section.