What Is Phonics in Reading?

When teaching—and learning—phonics there are many terms experts use when describing the process. Here, we’ll highlight and define, in a nutshell, the content and the terminology of phonics.

What Is the Definition of Phonics?

Phonics refers to the relationship between the sounds of language and the letters that represent those sounds. The term phonics is also used to refer to the teaching, learning, and application of these relationships.

Why Is Phonics Important?

In order to read with adequate rate and fluency and to comprehend what is read, children must learn the relationships between letters and the sounds they represent. This knowledge is the foundation for children’s development of a sight word vocabulary—words they can identify rapidly and accurately in print—and their ability to figure out unfamiliar words in their reading. The more students understand the structure of words, the more efficient their reading, and ultimately, their comprehension will be. They are better able to identify words quickly and accurately to figure out unfamiliar words they encounter. Moreover, it is important that children—and their teachers—come to understand that the relationships between sounds and their spellings are more logical than traditionally thought.

Phonological Awareness vs. Phonemic Awareness vs. Phonics

There are some differences between phonological awareness vs. phonemic awareness vs. phonics. Phonological awareness includes the ability to pay attention to and think about spoken language at the sentence, word, and syllable levels. Phonemic awareness, the most advanced component of phonological awareness, is the ability to think about the individual phonemes, or sounds, that make up spoken words. Phonics involves learning the relationships between these sounds and the letters that represent them.

What Is the Difference Between Phonemic Awareness and Phonics?

Phonemic awareness is concerned only with phonemes, or sounds, and phonics has to do with teaching and learning the relationship between these sounds and letters.

What Is the Difference Between Phonics and Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness includes all aspects of speech. Phonics refers to the relationship between letters and only one aspect of speech – phonemes.

What Are Some Key Phonics Skills?

Phonics skills depend on developing the following concepts and processes. Here we address some frequently asked questions about key phonics skills.

What Is a Phoneme in Phonics?

A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech. How do we know the spoken words “hop” and “pop” are different? Only by the sounds at the beginning of each word. How about “hop” and “hope”? We know they are different only because of the sounds in the middle of each word. These individual sounds are called phonemes, and they are the smallest unit of speech that helps us distinguish one word from another.

What Is a Grapheme in Phonics?

A grapheme is one or more letters that represent a single phoneme: In the word fit, f is the grapheme that represents the /f/ sound; in the word phone, ph is the grapheme that represents /f/; float has four graphemes: f-l-oa-t; throw has three graphemes: th-r-ow.

What Is a Phonics Pattern?

In single-syllable words, a pattern is a sequence of letters that functions as a unit to represent sound, such as oa in boat, soap, and load. A pattern also refers to a sequence of vowels and consonants, such as the consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern in the word get.

In two-syllable words, syllable patterns determine where to divide words in order to decode and blend individual syllables to identify the word.

What Is a Digraph in Phonics?

A digraph is two letters that represent a single sound: sh in shape and th in thing are consonant digraphs; ai in train, oa in boat, and ea in head are vowel digraphs. A trigraph is three letters that represent a single sound: dge in bridge, tch in scratch.

What Is a Blend in Phonics?

A blend is two or three consonant graphemes that represent sounds that are pronounced separately: b-l in blend; s-c-r in scrap; f-t in lift.

What Is a Diphthong in Phonics?

A diphthong is a speech sound within a syllable that, when spoken, begins with one vowel sound and then the tongue glides to another vowel sound. The oy in joy and the oi in noise represent the diphthong /oy/; the ou in south and the ow in clown represent the diphthong /ow/. For instructional purposes, /oy/ and /ow/ are treated as the only two diphthongs in English. Linguists point out that, technically, all long vowel sounds in English are diphthongs because, when spoken, the tongue glides from a lower to a higher position in the mouth. Most of us, however, are not aware of this phenomenon when pronouncing long vowels – we think of them as one sound. This “gliding” effect is much more obvious in the vowel sounds /oy/ and /ow/, and that is why they are the only sounds identified as “diphthongs” in phonics instruction.

What Is an Onset in Phonics?

An onset is the initial consonant(s) sound of a single syllable: /s/ in the word “sat”; /st/ in the word “stitch.”

What Is a Rime in Phonics?

A rime is the vowel and any following consonant sounds within a syllable: /at/ in the word “sat”; /ich/ in the word “stitch.”

What Is Blending in Phonics?

Blending is the process of sequentially combining letters and their corresponding sounds into a word: b + a + t = bat.

What Is Segmenting in Phonics?

Segmenting is the process of breaking an unfamiliar single-syllable word into individual letters and/or patterns and then blending together the sounds that those elements represent to identify the word.

What Is a Morpheme in Phonics?

A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language. For example, the word ants has two morphemes—ant and -s (s has the meaning of “more than one”). “Free” morphemes occur by themselves as words; “bound” morphemes, like -s, only occur “bound” to a word.

As students learn more about words and their structure, the foundation is built for understanding how the pronunciation of a series of letters in a particular morpheme may change depending on the word in which that morpheme occurs: for example, the “silent” b in crumb changes to a “sounded” b in crumble; the long i and the “silent” g in sign change to a short i and a “sounded” g in signal.

What Is Decoding in Phonics?

The process of decoding words involves matching a letter to a sound, and once the sounds of the letters are decoded, blending the sounds into a word. The word is then matched to meaning.

What Is Encoding in Phonics?

The process of encoding involves children applying their developing phonics knowledge when they write. Research has shown the importance of encouraging young children to write as they are learning about the correspondence between letters and sounds. These early encoding efforts also help develop phonemic awareness.

What Is Systematic and Explicit Phonics Instruction?

Systematic instruction addresses the relationships between letters, also called graphemes, and sounds in a developmentally-based scope and sequence that grows from less advanced to more advanced concepts and processes. For example, beginning consonant letter-sound relationships are taught before short vowel letter-sound relationships; consonant digraphs (th, sh) are addressed before consonant blends (st, br).

Explicit instruction is the teacher’s direct and concise explanation of concepts and processes. This explanation also addresses the logic that underlies these relationships, in other words, the reasons why the spelling system represents sounds the way it does. For example, in learning letter/sound correspondences for long a, the teacher helps children learn the reason for the different spellings, for example: ay usually occurs at the end of a word (play), while ai occurs in the middle of a word (paint).

Systematic and explicit instruction follows the “gradual release” model—I do, we do, you do. Using this method, the teacher models and explains, then the students apply the concept under the watchful eye of the teacher “coach” who provides feedback as necessary, and finally the students apply what they learned in real reading and writing contexts.

What Is Synthetic Phonics?

Synthetic phonics involves teaching individual sounds and letters and then blending these sounds to pronounce words. Here is an HMH Into Reading example of an instructional routine using a synthetic phonics approach:

What Is Analytic Phonics?

Analytic phonics involves using known words, and then asking students to examine their parts, listening for speech sounds and looking for spelling patterns that go with them. Students often use the spelling patterns in these known words to then figure out, by analogy, unknown words that have similar spelling patterns. Here is an example of HMH Into Reading instructional routine using an analytic phonics approach:

For example, after sorting the words with -an and -at into the columns above, the teacher discusses what the children notice about the words in each column. If no one mentions it, them point out that the words within each column rhyme. The teacher then tells the children they can use the patterns in these familiar words to figure out an unfamiliar word in their reading or when they’re spelling a word with short a.

Research has established that both synthetic and analytic phonic approaches should be used.

How Do You Get Started with Teaching Phonics?

Assess what children know and use that information as the starting point for teaching phonics. For example, if a child knows just a few letters, you can teach additional letters while focusing on phonological awareness activities like identifying beginning sounds and sorting pictures into groups according to the beginning sound for each picture. The corresponding letters that represent those beginning sounds are then learned; and partial phonemic awareness can develop along with learning about letters and letter names.

Once children are fully phonemically aware—that is, able to identify beginning, ending, and medial sounds within a single syllable—they are ready for phonics instruction that addresses all the letter-sound relationships within single-syllable words, beginning with short vowel patterns and moving to long vowel patterns. Research from texts, such as Word Study for Phonics, Spelling, and Vocabulary, has firmly established the developmental sequence according to which correspondences and patterns should be taught.

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