Rather, the purpose is to get across the alphabetical principle, the principle that there are systematic relationships between letters and sounds. Phonics ought to be conceived as a technique for getting children off to a fast start in mapping relationships between letters and sounds. A body of research suggests that development of phonological processing and learning to read are reciprocal processes. In other words, it may be that children learn to attend to the abstract sounds of language in the process of learning to read, and that attending leads to further reading development. The phonology of a language is the sound system, the way sounds are put together to form meaningful units that are intelligible to speakers.
Orthographic processing is the ability to analyze visually the appearance and structure of words.
Alphabetic reading requires both the awareness of sounds and the knowledge of how orthographic patterns, such as -eep, are pronounced. Orthographic knowledge requires a surprising amount of prerequisite knowledge. First, children need to know how and where to look for salient visual information. Second children must recognize and distinguish between letters. They also need to know how letters work to form words and how spelling patterns are mapped onto meaning and pronunciation.