2017 07 19 memb resource The Quick Guide to Phonics
The quick guide to phonics A National Literacy Trust membership resource
The following guide is a brief overview of the essentials for understanding synthetic phonics From terminology to spelling patterns, this guide is ideal for those starting out with phonics, and parents and secondary colleagues grappling with late decoders.
1. A definition What is phonics? Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write their language. It involves connecting the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters (e.g that the sound /k/ can be represented by c, k, ck or ch spellings) and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations of unknown words. In this way, phonics enables people to use individual sounds to construct words. For example, when taught the sounds for the letters t, p, a and s, one can build up the words "tap", "pat", "pats", "taps" and "sat".
2. Getting to grips with terminology The basics:
Q
A
What is a phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word that can change its meaning.
What is a grapheme?
A grapheme is the written representation of a phoneme; that is, a letter or group of letters representing a sound. There is always the same number of graphemes in a word as phonemes.
How many phonemes does English have?
It is generally agreed that there are 44 phonemes in spoken English.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017 T: 020 7587 1842 W: www.literacytrust.org.uk Twitter: @Literacy_Trust Facebook: nationalliteracytrust The National Literacy Trust is a registered charity no. 1116260 and a company limited by guarantee no. 5836486 registered in England and Wales and a registered charity in Scotland no. SC042944. Registered address: 68 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 1RL
What is phonological awareness?
The ability to perceive and manipulate the sounds of spoken words. It includes the smallest level, phonemes, but also larger units such as rimes and syllables.
What is phonemic awareness?
The ability to perceive and manipulate the phonemes in spoken words.
What is grapheme-phoneme correspondence?
The relationship between the graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds) they represent.
What is blending and segmenting?
Blending is to draw individual sounds together to pronounce a word and segmenting is the splitting up of words into their individual phonemes and to select the graphemes for each phoneme in order to spell the word. We blend to read and segment to spell.
The English language consists of approximately 44 sounds, or “phonemes”, represented by 26 letters. Phonemes in English can be represented in different ways. For example: the /s/ sound in sock is represented by c in city; the /k/ sound in kit can be represented by c in cat, ch in chorus, ck in back, and cc in account. In spite of this, the alphabetic system is efficient: 26 letters creating 44 phonemes in 144 combinations to form about half a million words in current use. The English alphabet includes 21 consonants; spoken English uses 24 consonant sounds, so the match between how we say a consonant and how we write it is generally predictable. Often, for secondary pupils, it is the rich array of long vowels which pose particular problems. English has 20 spoken vowel sounds but only five vowel letters; for example, the long /ai/ sound might be represented by ai, a-e, ea, ay, or eigh. The table below represents the most familiar phonemes-to-graphemes correspondence for vowels: Taken from Appendix 2, Page 21 of Letters and Sounds Notes of Guidance. Crown Copyright 2007
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
3. Drilling down further Q
A
What is a digraph?
Two letters which combine to represent one sound. e.g. chip, stick, train There are consonant digraphs – ch and vowel digraphs – ai
What is a trigraph?
Three letters representing one sound e.g. hedge, hair, snatch, bright
What is the difference between a consonant cluster and a consonant digraph?
Consonant clusters are two or three letters making two or three individual consonant sounds e.g. strict, blow A consonant digraph is two consonant letters making one sound e.g. flick, when
What is a split vowel digraph?
Vowel digraphs are two letters which combine to represent one vowel sound e.g.
out, boat, audit
Split vowel digraphs have a consonant separating the two vowels e.g. bite, hope, tube Vowel pairs: u-e, o-e, a-e, i-e, etc.
For pupils, the skills are two-fold:
the ability to segment words into their individual phonemes the ability and confidence in their knowledge of how to represent those phonemes with the correct choice of graphemes which is at the heart of phonics
At a simple level, phoneme counting and matching the corresponding graphemes looks like this:
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
Word
Number of phonemes
Split the word into phonemes
Word
Number of phonemes
Split the word into phonemes
that
3
/th/a/t/
dress
4
/d/r/e/ss/
ship
3
/sh/i/p/
scrap
5
/s/c/r/a/p/
thing
3
/th/i/ng/
flop
4
/f/l/o/p/
splash
5
/s/p/l/a/sh/
stand
5
/s/t/a/n/d/
day
2
/d/ay/
make
3
/m/a/k/e*
*a and e form a single split vowel digraph
As we get more complex, the choice of graphemes becomes wider. However, if pupils are specifically taught the different choices (see the table on page three – vowel phonemes to graphemes correspondence), they will become confident and familiar with their selections and spelling becomes demystified. Therefore, when faced with more complex words as below, they are able to segment and choose from their knowledge of individual graphemes (represented by . ), digraphs and trigraphs (represented by _ ) and split digraphs (represented by ͡ ).
4. Using and applying our knowledge Once pupils have these basic building blocks, we can encourage them to use that knowledge to develop conventions and rules that aid their spelling choices. For example: The phoneme /er/ can be spelt in a number of different ways - ir thirty, ur burn, er fern, or sailor, ear learn so we have to make informed choices. We need to explore how to make those choices and investigate conventions that may help us find what patterns emerge:
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
When /er/ is in the medial position in a word, it usually means these choices of graphemes:
However, when in the final position, we find the following more usual:
Our knowledge then helps inform the exploration of further spelling conventions relating to pluralisation, adding suffixes, etc. Below is a list of common conventions to explore: Conventions to help /ae/ Best guess is a-e tame. ay hay most common at the end of a word. ai laid only in the middle of a word. /ee/ ee screech or ea heat in the middle of a word. y cheery common at the end. ie achieve – i before e except after c, generally. /ie/ Best guess is split vowel digraph i-e line. igh words usually end in t might, except e.g. sigh, high. /oe/ Best guess is the split vowel digraph o-e bone. Other common spellings are oa moan and ow show is common at the end, except e.g. radio.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
/ue/ Best guess is the split vowel digraph u-e tune. Also common is oo moon. At the end of words most common is ew new, except e.g. blue, glue. Doubling Double the consonant at the end of words if the word has a short vowel and ends in one consonant, e.g. tap → tapping. Dropping Drop the e of a split vowel digraph when adding a vowel suffix, e.g. tape → taping. Adding -ing Short vowels: double the consonant when adding suffixes if the word has only one consonant. Long vowels: don’t double the consonant. Split vowel digraphs: drop the e when adding a vowel suffix, e.g. -ed, -ing. Doubling or dropping? The double and dropping rules apply when we are adding other suffixes, e.g. -ed, -er. Exceptions: hopeful, hopeless (adding consonant suffixes to split vowel digraphs) and tries, tried. /oi/ Spelled oi oil at the beginning or in the middle of a word. Spelled oy envoy at the end of a word. /ow/ Can be spelled ow how and ou hour. ow at the end of words and when followed by n. Most other words ou shout. /ar/ Three usual ways to spell /ar/, ar, al, a as in fast, past, cast, cart, start, palm (exception: heart). /er/ /er/ in the final position is usually spelled er. Months and seasons, family words, comparatives, all er. /au/ and /or/ possible spellings a small, aw saw, au August, ore ignore, oor floor, or for, al chalk and others. Adapted from the Literacy Progress Units ©Crown Copyright 2001
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
This guide forms a basic overview of the building blocks of phonics teaching. Phonics teaching and exploration should be fast, fun and engaging for pupils and embedded through word and spelling games, online games and investigations.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
The following guide is a brief overview of the essentials for understanding synthetic phonics From terminology to spelling patterns, this guide is ideal for those starting out with phonics, and parents and secondary colleagues grappling with late decoders.
1. A definition What is phonics? Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write their language. It involves connecting the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters (e.g that the sound /k/ can be represented by c, k, ck or ch spellings) and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations of unknown words. In this way, phonics enables people to use individual sounds to construct words. For example, when taught the sounds for the letters t, p, a and s, one can build up the words "tap", "pat", "pats", "taps" and "sat".
2. Getting to grips with terminology The basics:
Q
A
What is a phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word that can change its meaning.
What is a grapheme?
A grapheme is the written representation of a phoneme; that is, a letter or group of letters representing a sound. There is always the same number of graphemes in a word as phonemes.
How many phonemes does English have?
It is generally agreed that there are 44 phonemes in spoken English.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017 T: 020 7587 1842 W: www.literacytrust.org.uk Twitter: @Literacy_Trust Facebook: nationalliteracytrust The National Literacy Trust is a registered charity no. 1116260 and a company limited by guarantee no. 5836486 registered in England and Wales and a registered charity in Scotland no. SC042944. Registered address: 68 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 1RL
What is phonological awareness?
The ability to perceive and manipulate the sounds of spoken words. It includes the smallest level, phonemes, but also larger units such as rimes and syllables.
What is phonemic awareness?
The ability to perceive and manipulate the phonemes in spoken words.
What is grapheme-phoneme correspondence?
The relationship between the graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds) they represent.
What is blending and segmenting?
Blending is to draw individual sounds together to pronounce a word and segmenting is the splitting up of words into their individual phonemes and to select the graphemes for each phoneme in order to spell the word. We blend to read and segment to spell.
The English language consists of approximately 44 sounds, or “phonemes”, represented by 26 letters. Phonemes in English can be represented in different ways. For example: the /s/ sound in sock is represented by c in city; the /k/ sound in kit can be represented by c in cat, ch in chorus, ck in back, and cc in account. In spite of this, the alphabetic system is efficient: 26 letters creating 44 phonemes in 144 combinations to form about half a million words in current use. The English alphabet includes 21 consonants; spoken English uses 24 consonant sounds, so the match between how we say a consonant and how we write it is generally predictable. Often, for secondary pupils, it is the rich array of long vowels which pose particular problems. English has 20 spoken vowel sounds but only five vowel letters; for example, the long /ai/ sound might be represented by ai, a-e, ea, ay, or eigh. The table below represents the most familiar phonemes-to-graphemes correspondence for vowels: Taken from Appendix 2, Page 21 of Letters and Sounds Notes of Guidance. Crown Copyright 2007
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
3. Drilling down further Q
A
What is a digraph?
Two letters which combine to represent one sound. e.g. chip, stick, train There are consonant digraphs – ch and vowel digraphs – ai
What is a trigraph?
Three letters representing one sound e.g. hedge, hair, snatch, bright
What is the difference between a consonant cluster and a consonant digraph?
Consonant clusters are two or three letters making two or three individual consonant sounds e.g. strict, blow A consonant digraph is two consonant letters making one sound e.g. flick, when
What is a split vowel digraph?
Vowel digraphs are two letters which combine to represent one vowel sound e.g.
out, boat, audit
Split vowel digraphs have a consonant separating the two vowels e.g. bite, hope, tube Vowel pairs: u-e, o-e, a-e, i-e, etc.
For pupils, the skills are two-fold:
the ability to segment words into their individual phonemes the ability and confidence in their knowledge of how to represent those phonemes with the correct choice of graphemes which is at the heart of phonics
At a simple level, phoneme counting and matching the corresponding graphemes looks like this:
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
Word
Number of phonemes
Split the word into phonemes
Word
Number of phonemes
Split the word into phonemes
that
3
/th/a/t/
dress
4
/d/r/e/ss/
ship
3
/sh/i/p/
scrap
5
/s/c/r/a/p/
thing
3
/th/i/ng/
flop
4
/f/l/o/p/
splash
5
/s/p/l/a/sh/
stand
5
/s/t/a/n/d/
day
2
/d/ay/
make
3
/m/a/k/e*
*a and e form a single split vowel digraph
As we get more complex, the choice of graphemes becomes wider. However, if pupils are specifically taught the different choices (see the table on page three – vowel phonemes to graphemes correspondence), they will become confident and familiar with their selections and spelling becomes demystified. Therefore, when faced with more complex words as below, they are able to segment and choose from their knowledge of individual graphemes (represented by . ), digraphs and trigraphs (represented by _ ) and split digraphs (represented by ͡ ).
4. Using and applying our knowledge Once pupils have these basic building blocks, we can encourage them to use that knowledge to develop conventions and rules that aid their spelling choices. For example: The phoneme /er/ can be spelt in a number of different ways - ir thirty, ur burn, er fern, or sailor, ear learn so we have to make informed choices. We need to explore how to make those choices and investigate conventions that may help us find what patterns emerge:
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
When /er/ is in the medial position in a word, it usually means these choices of graphemes:
However, when in the final position, we find the following more usual:
Our knowledge then helps inform the exploration of further spelling conventions relating to pluralisation, adding suffixes, etc. Below is a list of common conventions to explore: Conventions to help /ae/ Best guess is a-e tame. ay hay most common at the end of a word. ai laid only in the middle of a word. /ee/ ee screech or ea heat in the middle of a word. y cheery common at the end. ie achieve – i before e except after c, generally. /ie/ Best guess is split vowel digraph i-e line. igh words usually end in t might, except e.g. sigh, high. /oe/ Best guess is the split vowel digraph o-e bone. Other common spellings are oa moan and ow show is common at the end, except e.g. radio.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
/ue/ Best guess is the split vowel digraph u-e tune. Also common is oo moon. At the end of words most common is ew new, except e.g. blue, glue. Doubling Double the consonant at the end of words if the word has a short vowel and ends in one consonant, e.g. tap → tapping. Dropping Drop the e of a split vowel digraph when adding a vowel suffix, e.g. tape → taping. Adding -ing Short vowels: double the consonant when adding suffixes if the word has only one consonant. Long vowels: don’t double the consonant. Split vowel digraphs: drop the e when adding a vowel suffix, e.g. -ed, -ing. Doubling or dropping? The double and dropping rules apply when we are adding other suffixes, e.g. -ed, -er. Exceptions: hopeful, hopeless (adding consonant suffixes to split vowel digraphs) and tries, tried. /oi/ Spelled oi oil at the beginning or in the middle of a word. Spelled oy envoy at the end of a word. /ow/ Can be spelled ow how and ou hour. ow at the end of words and when followed by n. Most other words ou shout. /ar/ Three usual ways to spell /ar/, ar, al, a as in fast, past, cast, cart, start, palm (exception: heart). /er/ /er/ in the final position is usually spelled er. Months and seasons, family words, comparatives, all er. /au/ and /or/ possible spellings a small, aw saw, au August, ore ignore, oor floor, or for, al chalk and others. Adapted from the Literacy Progress Units ©Crown Copyright 2001
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
This guide forms a basic overview of the building blocks of phonics teaching. Phonics teaching and exploration should be fast, fun and engaging for pupils and embedded through word and spelling games, online games and investigations.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
