Phonics Terminology

The teaching of Phonics involves introducing the children to the correct terminology to help build their skills and work more independently with their reading.

We hope that your child will be familiar with the following words, and it may be useful to discuss them at home when you are helping them with their reading.

Phoneme – the smallest unit of sound in a word.

Grapheme – the letter or letters representing a phoneme i.e t, ai, igh.

GPC – Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence – how we write each phoneme.

Blending – recognising the phonemes in each word and merging them in the order they are written to pronounce the word i.e c-a-t cat.

Oral blending – when no text is used, an adult sounds out i.e. b-u-s and the child can say ‘bus’.

Segmenting – identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word and being able to write down the letters for each sound i.e. him h-i-m.

Digraph – two letters which make one sound:

Consonant digraph – ch, sh, th

Vowel digraph – ea, ai, oo

Split vowel digraph – a digraph where the two letters are not adjacent – make

Trigraph – three letters which make one sound i.e. air, ear, igh.