English Phonics Glossary

Phonics – Phonics is a system of teaching children how spoken words can be broken down into into individual sounds called phonemes. These phonemes are then represented in writing by letters in words.

Phoneme – A phoneme is simply a sound. The English language is made up of around 44 separate sounds that come together to create spoken words. As an example “sit,” has three phonemes, S, I, T.

Grapheme – A grapheme is the written form of a phoneme. This can be a single letter or a group of letters that go together to make a sound. Examples of graphemes could be T on its own or TH as these make a single sound together.

Decoding – Decoding is the process of taking a word and breaking it down into its individual phonemes.

Spelling – Spelling is another step in this process. To begin to spell words the learner can sound out the word in its individual phonemes and then use their knowledge of how these sounds are represented in letters to form the word.

Tricky words – Tricky words are words that cannot be read or spelt correctly through phonics as they do not follow the same general rules as other words. These simply need to be learnt as a whole.

Segmenting and Blending – Segmenting describes the process of breaking a word up into its individual phonemes/sounds to spell a word and blending is the process of putting these back together to read the word.

Diagraph – A diagraph is when two letters written together create a phoneme (single sound) These can be vowels such as /oa/ or constants like /th/.

Trigraph – As with a diagraph this is when a group of letters make a sound but this time three letters. Examples include /igh/ or /ear/

Split vowel diagraph – A split vowel diagraph is is when two letter make a phoneme but have a letter in between. This is seen with some words ending in /e/ as it changes the sound of another vowel in the word. This is seen in the word /bike/ the /e/ on the end changes the sound made by the /i/

VC, CVC, CVCC – These abbreviations describe the letters used to make up a word, v stands for vowel and c for consonant.