Word-attack skills - American Education

An essential methodology for deciphering the meaning of new and unfamiliar words. There are three sets of basic word-attack skills: structural analysis, phonic analysis and contextual analysis. Structural analysis breaks down words into their meaningful parts—roots, prefixes and suffixes—and presumes a basic knowledge of those word elements. Phonic analysis ties various sound elements of the unfamiliar word with the same sounds of a word whose meaning is known. Contextual analysis attempts to derive a meaning for an unknown word from the meanings of the surrounding words and phrases.