Phonics Terminology
Blending – combining individual sounds to read a word.
Diagraph – two letters that make one sound.
Grapheme – a way of writing down a phoneme. Graphemes can be made of up to four letters.
Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence – the letter or letters that make up a sound.
High Frequency Words – the words that occur most frequently in writing.
Phoneme – the smallest unit of sound. There are approximately 44 phonemes in the English language. “Approximately” because there is so much regional variation in our accents.
Segmenting – splitting up words into individual sounds to spell it.
Split diagraph – two letters, split within a word, that make one sound. For example, a_e in make.
Tricky Words – words that cannot be decoded using phonics so must be learnt instead.
Trigraph – three letters that make one sound.
VC, CVC, CCVC — the abbreviations for vowel-consonant, consonant-vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant. Used to describe the order of letters in words.