Phonics

Phonics is an instructional method for teaching children to read English, involving teaching children to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters (e.g., the sound /t/ can be replaced with t, or te spellings) and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations of unknown words. Children begin learning to read using phonics usually around the age of 5 or 6.

Teaching English reading using phonics requires children to learn the connections between letter patterns and the sounds they represent. Phonics instruction requires the teacher to provide students with a core body of information about phonics rules, or patterns.

Basic rules:

1. Alphabetic principle

From a linguistics perspective, English spelling is based on the alphabetic principle. In an alphabetic writing system, letters are used to represent speech sounds, or phonemes. For example, the word pat is spelled with three letters, p, a, and t, each representing a phoneme, respectively, /p/, /æ/, and /t/.

In many cases the same sound can be spelled differently and the same spelling can represent different sounds. But the spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions.

Although the patterns are inconsistent, when English spelling rules take into account syllable structure, phonetics, and accents, there are dozens of rules that are 75% or more reliable.

2. Vowel phonics patterns

---Short vowels, named so because they are not diphthongs like the long vowels, are the five single letter vowels, a, e, i, o, and u. The term "short vowel" does not mean that they are pronounced for a particularly short period of time.

---Long vowels are synonymous with the names of the single letter vowels, such as /eɪ/ in baby, /iː/ in meter, /aɪ/ in tiny, /oʊ/ in broken, and /juː/ in humor. In classrooms, long vowels sounds are taught as being "the same as the names of the letters."

---Schwa is an indistinct sound of a vowel in an unstressed syllable, represented by the linguistic symbol ə. /ə/ is the sound made by the o in lesson. it is not always taught to elementary school students because it is difficult to understand.

---Closed syllables are syllables in which a single vowel letter is followed by a consonant.

---Open syllables are syllables in which a vowel appears at the end of the syllable.

---Diphthongs are linguistic elements that fuse two adjacent vowel sounds. English has four common diphthongs, including /eɪ/, /aɪ/, /oʊ/, and /juː/.

---Vowel digraphs are those spelling patterns wherein two letters are used to represent the 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. The au spelling of the /ɔː/ sound and the oo spelling of the /uː/ and /ʊ/ sounds do not 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. Examples of this include bake, theme, hike, cone, and cute. (The ee spelling, as in meet is sometimes considered part of this pattern.)

3. Consonant phonics patterns

---Consonant digraphs are those spellings wherein two letters are used to represent a consonant phoneme. The most common consonant digraphs ch for /tʃ/, ng for /ŋ/, ph for /f/, sh for /ʃ/, th for /θ/ and /ð/, and wh for /ʍ/ (often pronounced /w/ in American English). Letter combinations like wr for /r/ and kn for /n/ are also consonant digraphs, although these are sometimes considered patterns with "silent letters."

---Short vowel+consonant patterns involve the spelling of the sounds /k/ as in peek, /dʒ/ as in stage, and /tʃ/ as in speech. These sounds each have two possible spellings at the end of a word, ck and k for /k/, dge and ge for /dʒ/, and tch and ch for /tʃ/.

Sight words and high frequency words:

---There are words that do not follow these phonics rules, such as were, who, and you. They are often called "sight words" because they must be memorized by sight.

---Teachers who use phonics also often teach students to memorize the most high frequency words in English, such as it, he, them, and when.