Single word decoding involves two primary base skills:

1. Visual Skills: The recognition of the alphabet symbol and the conversion of this symbol into a sound (ie: Not letter name).
2. Auditory Skills: The phonemic awareness skill of blending three sounds (or phonemes) together to form a word.

The following example illustrates the process of early decoding. To read the word ‘sit’ a student must:

1. Visually recognise the symbol ‘s’ and convert the symbol to the sound /s/.
2. Visually recognise the symbol ‘i’, and convert the symbol into the sound /i/.
3. Visually recognise the symbol ‘t’, and convert the symbol into the sound /t/.
4. Finally, the ‘s’, ‘i’ and ‘t’ sounds are held in the working memory, then need to be blended together to form the word.

Over time children become more efficient at a visual and an auditory level. For example, rather than decoding the word ‘sit’ in three parts the word may be decoded in two parts (e.g. s-it). After much decoding practice students develop automatic word recognition and will read the word in full without sounding.