Download PHONICS Terminology - St Edward`s Catholic First School

Terminology for Phonics
In English there are about 44 different sounds (phonemes).
Children are taught the letters (graphemes) that represent these
sounds (phonemes). They learn to put the phonemes together
(blend them) to read words. They also learn to break words into
phonemes (segment them) for spelling.
phoneme
The smallest unit of sound in a word
grapheme
Letter(s) which represent a phoneme/sound
grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC)
The relationship between a phoneme and a grapheme. Children need to be
able to write/find a grapheme in response to the phoneme and say the
phoneme(s) when looking at a grapheme
digraph
Two letters which make one sound e.g. ‘sh’, ‘ai’, ‘ph’
trigraph
Three letters which make one sound e.g. ‘igh’
split digraph
(used to be known as magic ‘e’)
A vowel digraph (e.g. ‘ie’) which is split up by another letter e.g. 'time’,'make’
short vowel
A vowel sound which is short. There are 5 of them: /a/ (as in cat), /e/ (as in
bed), /i/ (as in pin), /o/ (as in hot), /u/ (as in hut)
long vowel
A vowel sound which is long. There are 5 of them: /ai/ (as in make, rain, day),
/ee/ (as in these, me, tree), /igh/ (as in tie, night, my), /oa/ (as in coat, low,
go), /ue/ (as in moon, tune, unit)
blend/cluster
Two (or three) letters making two (or three) sounds e.g. lost, sprite
blending
Reading the letters in a written word e.g. b-a-t, and merging them to
pronounce the word (‘bat’). This skill is needed for reading.
segmenting
Identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word e.g. b-a-t, and writing
down or moving letters for each sound to form the word (‘bat’). This skill
is needed for spelling.
Tricky words
These are words which can't be completely sounded out. They usually have
one or more bits which are tricky. The children have to learn to read them as
whole words and remember how to write the tricky bit when spelling them.
CVC
CVC stands for Consonant Vowel Consonant i.e. cat, pin, pet, pot, put
CCVC
CCVC stands for Consonant Consonant Vowel Consonant i.e. trap, chop, stun,
grit, shop
CVCC
CVCC stands for Consonant Vowel Consonant Consonant i.e. hunt, fast, cart,
milk, want