Phonics

Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing to beginners. To use phonics is to teach the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language, and the letters or groups of letters or syllables of the written language. Phonics is also known as the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code. It can be used with any writing system that is alphabetic, such as that of English, Russian, and most other languages. Phonics is also sometimes used as part of the process of teaching people from China to read and write Chinese characters, which are not alphabetic, using pinyin, which is alphabetic.
While the principles of phonics generally apply regardless of the language or region, the examples in this article are from General American English pronunciation. For more about phonics as it applies to British English, see Synthetic phonics, a method by which the student learns the sounds represented by letters and letter combinations, and blends these sounds to pronounce words.
Phonics is taught using a variety of approaches, for example:

learning individual sounds and their corresponding letters, whereas the word shape has five letters but three sounds: sh - a - p or
learning the sounds of letters or groups of letters, at the word level, such as similar sounds, or rimes, or consonant blends , or syllables, or
having students read books, play games and perform activities that contain the sounds they are learning.
Overview

Reading by using phonics is often referred to as decoding words, sounding-out words or using print-to-sound relationships. Since phonics focuses on the sounds and letters within words, it is often contrasted with whole language and a compromise approach called balanced literacy.
Some phonics critics suggest that learning phonics prevents children from reading "real books". However, the Department for Education in England says children should practise phonics by reading books consistent with their developing phonic knowledge and skill; and, at the same time they should hear, share and discuss "a wide range of high-quality books to develop a love of reading and broaden their vocabulary". In addition, researchers say that "the phonological pathway is an essential component of skilled reading" and "for most children it requires instruction, hence phonics". Some recommend 20–30 minutes of daily phonics instruction in grades K–2, about 200 hours.
The National Reading Panel in the United States concluded that systematic phonics instruction is more effective than unsystematic phonics or non-phonics instruction. Some critics suggest that systematic phonics is "skill and drill" with little attention to meaning. However, researchers point out that this impression is false. Teachers can use engaging games or materials to teach letter-sound connections, and it can also be incorporated with the reading of meaningful text.

History

The term phonics during the 19th century and into the 1970s was used as a synonym of phonetics. The use of the term in reference to the method of teaching is dated to 1901 by the Oxford English Dictionary. The relationship between sounds and letters is the backbone of traditional phonics.
This principle was first presented by John Hart in 1570. Prior to that children learned to read through the ABC method, by which they recited the letters used in each word, from a familiar piece of text such as Genesis. It was John Hart who first suggested that the focus should be on the relationship between what is now referred to as graphemes and phonemes.
For more information see [|Practices by country or region] ; and History of learning to read.

Phonemic awareness

Not to be confused with phonics, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual spoken sounds of language, independent of writing. Phonemic awareness is part of oral language ability and is critical for learning to read. To assess phonemic awareness, or teach it explicitly, learners are given a variety of exercises, such as adding a sound, changing a sound , or removing a sound . Phonemic awareness and the resulting knowledge of spoken language is the most important determinant of a child's early reading success. Phonemic awareness is sometimes taught separately from phonics and at other times it is the result of phonics instruction.
It is that part of phonological awareness that is concerned with phonemes.
In one instance, a 2014 program of advanced phonemic awareness training improved the PA but not the word reading. When teaching phonemic awareness, the National Reading Panel found that better results were obtained with focused and explicit instruction of one or two elements, over five or more hours, in small groups, and using the corresponding graphemes.

The alphabetic principle (also: The alphabetic code)

is based on the alphabetic principle. In the education field it is also referred to as the alphabetic code. In an alphabetic writing system, letters are used to represent speech sounds, or phonemes. For example, the word cat is spelled with three letters, c, a, and t, each representing a phoneme, respectively,,, and.
The spelling structures for some alphabetic languages, such as Spanish, Russian and German, are comparatively orthographically transparent, or orthographically shallow, because there is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letter patterns that represent them. English spelling is more complex, a deep orthography, partly because it attempts to represent the 40+ phonemes of the spoken language with an alphabet composed of only 26 letters. As a result, two letters are often used together to represent distinct sounds, referred to as digraphs. For example, t and h placed side by side to represent either as in math or as in father.
English has absorbed many words from other languages throughout its history, usually without changing the spelling of those words. As a result, the written form of English includes the spelling patterns of many languages superimposed upon one another. These overlapping spelling patterns mean that in many cases the same sound can be spelled differently and the same spelling can represent different sounds. However, the spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions. In addition, the Great Vowel Shift, a historical linguistic process in which the quality of many vowels in English changed while the spelling remained as it was, greatly diminished the transparency of English spelling in relation to pronunciation.
The result is that English spelling patterns vary considerably in the degree to which they follow rules. For example, the letters ee almost always represent , but the sound can also be represented by the letters e, i and y and digraphs ie, ei, or ea. Similarly, the letter cluster ough represents as in enough, as in though, as in through, as in cough, as in bough, as in bought, and as in hiccough, while in slough and lough, the pronunciation varies.
Although the patterns are inconsistent, when English spelling rules take into account syllable structure, phonetics, etymology, and accents, there are dozens of rules that are 75% or more reliable. This level of reliability can only be achieved by extending the rules far outside the domain of phonics, which deals with letter-sound correspondences, and into the morphophonemic and morphological domains.

Alternative spellings of the sounds

The following are a selection of the alternative spellings of the 40+ sounds of the English language based on General American English pronunciation, recognizing there are many regional variations. Teachers of synthetic phonics emphasize the letter sounds instead of the letter names. It is usually recommended that teachers of English-reading introduce the "most frequent sounds" and the "common spellings" first and save the more infrequent sounds and complex spellings for later..
For a more complete list of alternative spellings of the sounds, see.
'''Complex consonants and digraphs:'''

Vowel and consonant phonics patterns

The following is an explanation of many of the phonics patterns.

Vowel phonics patterns

Short vowels are the five single letter vowels, a, e, i, o, and u, when they produce the sounds as in cat, as in bet, as in sit, as in hot, and as in cup. The term "short vowel" is historical, and meant that at one time these vowels were pronounced for a particularly short period of time; currently, it means just that they are not diphthongs like the long vowels.
Long vowels have the same sound as the names of the vowels, such as in bay, in bee, in mine, in no, and in use. The way that educators use the term "long vowels" differs from the way in which linguists use this term. Careful educators use the term "long vowel letters" or "long vowels", not "long vowel sounds", since four of the five long vowels in fact represent combinations of sounds and only one consists of a single vowel sound that is long, which is how linguists use the term. In classrooms, long vowels are taught as having "the same sounds as the names of the letters". Teachers teach the children that a long vowel "says its name".
Schwa is the third sound that most of the single vowel spellings can represent. It is the indistinct sound of many a vowel in an unstressed syllable, and is represented by the linguistic symbol ; it is the sound of the o in lesson, of the a in sofa. Although it is the most common vowel sound in spoken English, schwa is not always taught to elementary school students because some find it difficult to understand. However, some educators make the argument that schwa should be included in primary reading programs because of its vital importance in the correct pronunciation of English words.
Closed syllables are syllables in which a single vowel letter is followed by a consonant. In the word button, both syllables are closed syllables because they contain single vowels followed by consonants. Therefore, the letter u represents the short sound.
Open syllables are syllables in which a vowel appears at the end of the syllable. The vowel will say its long sound. In the word basin, ba is an open syllable and therefore says.
Diphthongs are linguistic elements that fuse two adjacent vowel sounds. English has four common diphthongs. The commonly recognized diphthongs are as in cow and as in boil. Three of the long vowels are also in fact combinations of two vowel sounds, in other words diphthongs: as in "I" or mine, as in no, and as in bay, which partly accounts for the reason they are considered "long".
Vowel digraphs are those spelling patterns wherein two letters are used to represent a vowel sound. The ai in sail is a vowel digraph. Because the first letter in a vowel digraph sometimes says its long vowel sound, as in sail, some phonics programs once taught that "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking." This convention has been almost universally discarded owing to the many non-examples, such as the au spelling of the sound and the oo spelling of the and sounds, neither of which follow this pattern.
Vowel-consonant-E spellings are those wherein a single vowel letter, followed by a consonant and the letter e makes the long vowel sound. The tendency is often referred to as "the silent E" or "the magic E" with examples such as bake, theme, hike, cone, and cute.
R-controlled syllables include those wherein a vowel followed by an r has a different sound from its regular pattern. For example, a word like car should have the pattern of a "closed syllable" because it has one vowel and ends in a consonant. However, the a in car does not have its regular "short" sound because it is controlled by the r. The r changes the sound of the vowel that precedes it. Other examples include: park, horn, her, bird, and burn.
The Consonant-le syllable is a final syllable, located at the end of the base/root word. It contains a consonant, followed by the letters le. The e is silent and is present because it was pronounced in earlier English and the spelling is historical. Examples are: candle, stable and apple.