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What is...?
On this page, we try and explain some of the teacher-speak in use on this and other educational websites, for the benefit of parents and carers working with children at home.
Phonics
Phonics is the system of linking sounds (phonemes) and their written form (graphemes) in
order to recognise and read words, using basic units of knowledge to “decode”
new or unfamiliar words.
There are 44 unique sounds in the English language. Below are the main terms that describe how those sounds are associated with the 26 letters of the alphabet
Phoneme - A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound as it is
spoken.
Grapheme - A grapheme is a written symbol that represents a sound (phoneme) that's either one letter or a sequence of letters
Digraph - A digraph is a combination of two letters that work together to make one sound (ch, sh, the, ea)
Trigraph - A trigraph is when three letters work together to make the same sound (igh, ore, ear)
Split digraph (sometimes called 'magic e') - A split digraph is when two letters combine to make the same sound, separated by another letter in the same word, such as man/mane, hat/hate, fin/fine etc. The second letter of the split digraph is always "e." In the word "pie," the ie is a digraph of vowels - commonly called a vowel digraph.. If you write pine, you split the ie digraph with the letter n.
Grapheme - A grapheme is a written symbol that represents a sound (phoneme) that's either one letter or a sequence of letters
Digraph - A digraph is a combination of two letters that work together to make one sound (ch, sh, the, ea)
Trigraph - A trigraph is when three letters work together to make the same sound (igh, ore, ear)
Split digraph (sometimes called 'magic e') - A split digraph is when two letters combine to make the same sound, separated by another letter in the same word, such as man/mane, hat/hate, fin/fine etc. The second letter of the split digraph is always "e." In the word "pie," the ie is a digraph of vowels - commonly called a vowel digraph.. If you write pine, you split the ie digraph with the letter n.
Decoding
Decoding a word is the activity of identifying which letter (grapheme) or group of letters correspond to which sound (phoneme)
Decoding a word is the activity of identifying which letter (grapheme) or group of letters correspond to which sound (phoneme)