The way I put it in a ThatReadingThing training is that we are about “Sounds and the Spelling of Sounds” – helping our learners move from sound to print and back again.
Sounds -also known as:
Spellings of sounds – also known as:
- graphemes
- symbols
- letters or groups of letters
Phonics is concerned with matching phonemes to graphemes:
- (reading) Say the sounds and tell me what you hear.
It is also concerned with matching graphemes to phonemes:
- (building and spelling) What’s the first sound in trap? Say the sound as you write.
Grapheme/Phoneme Correspondences are said to be “One to Many” and “Many to one”.*
One to Many – also known as:
- <y> happy July myth yet
- pronunciation variations
- one symbol with more than one pronunciation
- Spelling Clone: looks the same – sounds different
Many to One - also known as:
- “ee” team see be scheme key baby chief police receive foetus
- spelling variations
- one sound represented by more than one symbol
- Sound Clone: sounds the same – looks different
*The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, ed. Florian Coulmas, 1996, Oxford: Blackwell
