Which practice involves breaking down words to decode them?

• A. Breaking down words to decode them
• B. From whole to parts
• C. Recognizing book cover
• D. The alphabetic principle

Answer: (A)

Decoding by breaking words into their individual sounds and mapping those sounds to letters is exactly what decoding practice looks like. This approach uses phonemic awareness to segment a word into sounds and then blend them back together to pronounce it. It embodies applying the alphabetic principle, which is the idea that letters represent sounds and that strings of sounds can be put together to form words. For example, breaking a word like "cat" into its sounds and matching /c/, /a/, /t/ to the letters c-a-t helps you read it even if you haven’t seen it before.

The other ideas aren’t about this decoding process: thinking about a word from whole to parts emphasizes recognizing whole word shapes rather than sounding out; recognizing a book cover focuses on visual features; and the alphabetic principle is the rule behind how sounds map to letters rather than the act of breaking a word down to read it.