Academic Associates Reading Course is a phonetic program based linguistically on the 44 sounds we use in English. There are 13 lessons and each one focuses on decoding rules. A lesson takes as long as a student needs to be able to retain and apply those rules. With the first lesson, the student learns the 5 short vowels and the 16 consonants that have only one sound. Then the student uses those tools to sound out 300 words.

At Academic Associates, students learn decoding skills to unlock all the words of English, learn fluency, and master comprehension. Critical reading skills are taught. Most read several books during the course and typically gain 2-5 grade levels (even many students who have been diagnosed with learning disabilities). We do not use visual, "meaning-based," or analytic phonics, which is so popular today. For example, we do not have students learn to substitute one consonant for another at the beginning or ending of words to make a new word (or by using whole word analogies in "cut and paste" style such as cat + mop = cop).

Many bright students become crippled in their reading abilities today by instructional approaches, which "hardwire" their brains to read as if English were an ideographic or pictographic language. Since they have been programmed to read incorrectly, they need to be retrained to read phonetically.

The Academic Associates method cooperates with the brain's own neural architecture. It streamlines the flow of data into the linguistic part of the brain, simplifying and accelerating the process of learning to read. The brain is retrained to read phonetically. This is one of the primary reasons Academic Associates has been so successful in teaching children who have failed with other programs to read.