Essential Primary Phonics Terms and Examples

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We’ve thrown together a handy glossary of all the key terms you'll need if you’re looking to get your head around Phonics.

So, with no further ado, let’s dive right in:
 

What are Phonemes and Graphemes?

Phoneme

A phoneme is the smallest ‘unit’ of sound that can be heard in a word.

Phonemes are not the same as letter names — e.g. the name of the letter ‘s’ is said ‘ess’, but the phoneme is the ‘pure’ sound that the letter makes in a word, i.e. ‘sss’ (and not ‘suh’).

Did you know? There are 44 phonemes in English (depending on your accent!)

 

Grapheme

A grapheme is the symbol, letter, or group of letters that represents a sound (phoneme).

E.g. ‘a’, ‘t’, ‘oo’, ‘ck’ are all graphemes.

 

Segmenting

Segmenting is the process of breaking a word down into individual sounds (phonemes).
E.g. ‘cat’ becomes ‘c’-‘a’-‘t’. Segmenting is the reverse of blending.

 

Blending

Blending is the process of joining sounds (phonemes) together to say a word.
E.g. ‘c’-‘a’-‘t’ becomes ‘cat’. Blending is the reverse of segmenting.

My favourite thing to blend is a smoothie: mango + banana = bliss.

 

Decoding

Decoding is working out how to say an unfamiliar written word (also called ‘sounding out’).

 

What is a Digraph?

Digraph

A digraph is a two-letter grapheme that makes one sound (phoneme) — e.g. ‘oa’, ‘ch’.

 

Trigraph

A trigraph is a three-letter grapheme that makes one sound (phoneme) — e.g. ‘igh’, ‘are’.

 

Split Digraph

A two-letter grapheme making one sound (phoneme), where the letters of the grapheme are separated in the word.

In English, these are made up of a vowel (or a ‘y’) whose sound is modified by a later ‘e’ — e.g. cake, type.

The letters of a split digraph are usually separated by only one letter, but there are a few examples of two letters separating them — e.g. ache, cologne, scythe.

 

Phonics Acronyms: GPC, VC, CVC? IDK.

Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence (GPC)

Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence is the matching of graphemes (e.g. ‘p’, ‘i’, ‘n’) to phonemes (e.g. ‘puh’, ‘ih’, ‘nnn’), and vice versa.
Graphemes are converted to phonemes when reading aloud (decoding).

Phonemes are converted to graphemes when spelling for writing (also known as ‘encoding’).

 

Vowel Consonant words (VC)

‘Vowel-Consonant’ words are words such as ‘in’, ‘at’, ‘oat’, ‘each’.
V and C represent vowel and consonant sounds (phonemes), so include multi-letter graphemes as well as single letters.

Not to be confused with the Victoria Cross (also VC) — the most prestigious award available to members of the British Armed Forces…

 

Consonant-Vowel-Consonant’ words (CVC)

‘Consonant-Vowel-Consonant’ words are words such as ‘pin’, ‘sat’, ‘boat’, ‘chop’.

It can be a bit perplexing to see a single ‘C’ or ‘V’ represent more than one written letter, but after a bit of time it becomes second nature. Like saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes.

 

Adjacent consonants

Two or more consonant sounds that are next to each other in a word — e.g. ‘tr’ in trick (CCVC), ‘nd’ in round (CVCC), ‘cr’ and ‘sp’ in crisp (CCVCC) and ‘str’ in street (CCCVC).

 

High-Frequency words

This usually refers to the 100 most common words in reading material for young children — e.g. ‘and’, ‘a’ , ‘go’.
Many (but not all) of these are decodable if the GPCs are known.

 

Tricky words

High-frequency words that have unusual or untaught GPCs.
These cannot be decoded using phonic strategies on their own — e.g. ‘the’, ‘to’ — so they need to be learned separately.

A party trick I like to pull out every so often is something I call ‘making a whole wheel of cheese disappear’. It mystifies my audience and infuriates my doctors.

 

Test words:

Phonics Screening Check

A short test usually sat in June of Year 1. Children are asked to read a mix of real and pseudo-words to assess their phonics ability. 

 

Pseudo-words / nonsense words / alien words

These are words that can be sounded out using Phonics but have no meaning (e.g. ‘ot’, ‘ect’). These words are used in the Phonics Screening Check to test pupils' ability to apply Phonics knowledge to unfamiliar words.

 

And there you have it — the buzziest buzzwords in Phonics.

 

Brilliant Phonics Resources on CGP+

If you’re hankering for some fun-filled interactive games to set your children on their way to Phonics mastery, check out the range of online Phonics activities on CGP+. 

We’ve also got tons of Phonics Worksheets, and even PowerPoints.

So no matter what Phonics topic has you in a funk, CGP+ is here to help. 😊