Phonics Terminology
Please find below a list of the terminology used within our teaching and learning of phonics:
Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound in a word.
Digraph: Two letters which together make one sound. There are different types of digraph – vowel, consonant and split.
Trigraph: Three letters which together make one sound.
E.g. air, igh, ure
Consonant digraph: Two consonants which make one sound.
E.g. ch, sh, th, ph.
Vowel digraph: A digraph in which at least one of the letters is a vowel.
E.g. ea, ay, ai, ar
Split digraph: Two letters, which work as a pair to make one sound, but are separated within the word.
E.g. a-e as in make or late; i-e as in size or write.
Blending: The process of using phonics for reading. Children identify and synthesise/blend the phonemes in order
to make a word.
E.g. s-n-a-p, blended together, reads snap.
Segmenting: The process of using phonics for writing. Children listen to the whole word and break it down into the constituent phonemes, choosing an appropriate grapheme to represent each phoneme.
E.g. ship can be segmented as sh-i-p. one sound.
GPC - This is short for Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence. Knowing a GPC means being able to match a phoneme to a grapheme and vice versa.
CVC, CCVCC etc: The abbreviations used for consonant-vowel consonant and consonant-consonant-vowel consonant-consonant words, used to describe the order of sounds.
E.g. cat, ship and sheep are all CVC words. Black and prize could be described as CCVC words.
Useful phonics links:
https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/index.htm
https://www.mrthornenetwork.com/phonics
Mr Thorne Does Phonics: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7sW4j8p7k9D_qRRMUsGqyw
https://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com/