In an attempt to describe the place of phonics in a word-attack program, five areas of word attack are discussed: sight recognition, the use of context clues, morphology (structural analysis), phonics, and dictionary use. Facility in the use of all of these, singly and in combination, is stated as being necessary for a person to be an independent reader. Next, 12 particularly useful grapheme-to-phoneme relationships which the author considers to require description in a phonics program are discussed: four related to consonant graphemes, five related to vowel graphemes, and three related to phonic syllabication. A brief description of the four components of most phonics lessons is also included: auditory discrimination, visual discrimination, blending, and contextual application. References are given. (Author/DE)