Learn about phonics

Phonics teaching step-by-step | TheSchoolRun

Sort your phonemes from your graphemes, decoding from encoding and digraphs from trigraphs with our parents' guide to phonics teaching. Our step-by-step explanation takes you through the different stages of phonics learning, what your child will be expected to learn and the vocabulary you need to know.

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What is phonics?

Phonics is a method of teaching children to read by linking sounds (phonemes) and the symbols that represent them (graphemes, or letter groups). Phonics is the learning-to-read method used in primary schools in the UK today.

What is a phoneme?

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. The phonemes used when speaking English are:

Print out a list of phonemes to practise with your child or listen to the individual sounds being spoken with our phonics worksheets.

Phonics learning step 1: decoding

Children are taught letter sounds in Reception. This involves thinking about what sound a word starts with, saying the sound out loud and then recognising how that sound is represented by a letter.

The aim is for children to be able to see a letter and then say the sound it represents out loud. This is called decoding.

Some phonics programmes start children off by learning the letters s, a, t, n, i, p first. This is because once they know each of those letter sounds, they can then be arranged into a variety of different words (for example: sat, tip, pin, nip, tan, tin, sip, etc.). While children are learning to say the sounds of letters out loud, they will also begin to learn to write these letters (encoding).

They will be taught where they need to start with each letter and how the letters need to be formed in relation to each other. Letters (or groups of letters) that represent phonemes are called graphemes.

Phonics learning step 2: blending

Children then need to go from saying the individual sounds of each letter, to being able to blend the sounds and say the whole word. This can be a big step for many children and takes time.

Phonics learning step 3: decoding CVC words

Children will focus on decoding (reading) three-letter words arranged consonant, vowel, consonant (CVC words) for some time.

They will learn other letter sounds, such as the consonants g, b, d, h and the remaining vowels e, o, u. Often, they will be given letter cards to put together to make CVC words which they will be asked to say out loud.

Phonics learning step 4: decoding consonant clusters in CCVC and CVCC words

Children will also learn about consonant clusters: two consonants located together in a word, such tr, cr, st, lk, pl. Children will learn to read a range of CCVC words (consonant, consonant, vowel, consonant) such as trap, stop, plan.

They will also read a range of CVCC words (consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant) such as milk, fast, cart.

Phonics learning step 5: vowel digraphs

Children are then introduced to vowel digraphs. A digraph is two vowels that together make one sound such as: /oa/, /oo/, /ee/, /ai/. They will move onto sounding out words such as deer, hair, boat, etc. and will be taught about split digraphs (or 'magic e').

They will also start to read words combining vowel digraphs with consonant clusters, such as: train, groan and stool.

Phonics learning step 6: consonant digraphs

Children will also learn the consonant digraphs (two consonants that together make one sound) ch and sh and start blending these with other sounds to make words, such as: chat, shop, chain and shout.

Encoding, or learning to spell as well as read

Alongside this process of learning to decode (read) words, children will need to continue to practise forming letters which then needs to move onto encoding. Encoding is the process of writing down a spoken word, otherwise known as spelling.

They should start to be able to produce their own short pieces of writing, spelling the simple words correctly.

It goes without saying that reading a range of age-appropriate texts as often as possible will really support children in their grasp of all the reading and spelling of all the phonemes.

Phonics learning in KS1

By the end of Reception, children should be able to write one grapheme for each of the 44 phonemes.

In Year 1, they will start to explore vowel digraphs and trigraphs (a group of three letters that makes a single sound, like 'igh' as in 'sigh') further.

They will begin to understand, for example, that the letters ea can make different sounds in different words (dream and bread). They will also learn that one sound might be represented by different groups of letters: for example, light and pie (igh and ie make the same sound).

Children in Year 2 will be learning spelling rules, such as adding suffixes to words (such as -ed, -ing, -er, -est, -ful, -ly, -y, -s, -es, -ment and -ness). They will be taught rules on how to change root words when adding these suffixes (for example, removing the 'e' from 'have' before adding 'ing') and then move onto harder concepts, such as silent letters (knock, write, etc) and particular endings (le in bottle and il in fossil).

Free phonics worksheets and information for parents

For more information about the phonics system look through our phonics articles, including ways to boost phonics confidence, details of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check, parents' phonics questions answered and more.

We also have a large selection of free phonics worksheets to download for your child.

A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers

An Introduction to Phonics and learning to read

Throughout this article, I aim to provide you with a clear understanding of teaching phonics effectively in the classroom and offer a variety of strategies and proven ideas to teach phonics.

WHAT IS PHONICS? A DEFINITION FOR TEACHERS AND PARENTS.

Phonics can be defined as a body of knowledge and skills regarding how the alphabet works.

In the context of this article, phonics refers to the method of teaching a student to read by developing their phonemic awareness and an understanding of the links between these sounds and how we use the letters of the alphabet to represent them.

This understanding is essential not only to read well but to bridge the gap between reading and writing.

With a good foundation of phonics knowledge, students can quickly become confident readers and independent solid writers.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS IMPROVES READING FLUENCY

When students develop phonemic awareness, it dramatically enhances their reading fluency which is a reading “superpower”, allowing students to read with speed, accuracy and expression. Reading fluency dramatically enhances students’ ability to read with intonation and energy that translates into expressive writing skills.

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How To Teach Reading Using PhonicsPhonics is a research-based solution to improving reading

The use of phonics, or synthetic phonics as this method is technically known, is an effective and efficient means of teaching young students how to read. For this reason, phonics is the primary methodology for teaching reading in the school systems of many English-speaking countries.

In English, there are around 44 sounds or phonemes. Given that there are only 26 letters used in the language and that many sounds have more than one possible spelling, it is helpful that students learn the relationships between the letters and sounds in a straightforward and explicit manner.

To achieve this, phonics centers on the relationship between sounds and how they can be spelled.

It focuses on the letter and sound correspondences to enable students to break written words down into their component sounds before later recombining them to read the whole word. This process is known as segmenting and blending.

SEGMENTING AND BLENDING

Rather than allowing students to struggle to recognize complete words, as in the whole word method, or to look for contextual clues to figure out what is being said in a text, phonics teaches students to look at the letters of a word and segment it into its component sounds, before blending these sounds back together to read the entire word.

For example, when faced with the word cat, a student might run their finger under the first letter and make the initial /k/ sound, then /a/, and, finally, /t/.

Once they have successfully segmented these individual sounds, they then blend them together to say the word /kat/.

With practice, the speed with which students can look at a word, segment the sounds, and then blend these sounds together to read the word rapidly increases. This makes learning to read through the phonics method the most efficient way for most children to learn not just to read but to write too.

DECODING AND ENCODING: THE BRIDGE BETWEEN READING AND WRITING

Initially, phonics reaps rich rewards for students in terms of the passive skill of reading. This is also known as decoding.

Later, the student’s knowledge of phonics can help them develop the active skill of writing or encoding.

For this reason, teachers will often weave emergent writing skills, such as letter formation, into their phonics lessons to take advantage of the opportunity to bridge this gap between reading and writing skills.

WHAT ABOUT SIGHT WORDS?

As effective as synthetic phonics are in teaching students to read, they won’t be enough on their own to unravel all the opaque mysteries of English orthography.

English is something of a mongrel language. Over the centuries, it has been influenced by the German, Latin, French, Greek, and Celtic languages, among others.

This fact has led to many inconsistencies in spelling surviving in the modern language. Sometimes phonics won’t be enough to decode these words. That’s why students need to learn to read some words by sight alone.

Sight words, or high-frequency words as they are also known, are those extremely common words used time and again in most texts. Many of them are phonetically irregular and follow no conventional spelling rules. For children’s reading books, sight words can account for up to 75% of the words in the text.

Therefore, it’s best to combine the study of phonics with the learning of these sight words for maximum effectiveness. This is something to consider when engaged in your long-term planning.

The most effective strategy for learning these sight words is for discussion another day; for the remainder of this article, we will focus exclusively on the teaching of phonics.

DOWNLOAD THE 100 & 200 MOST COMMON SIGHT WORDS FREE HERE

THE STAGES OF PHONICS TEACHING

Before beginning to teach phonics, it is helpful to have a broad overview of the various stages that comprise a comprehensive synthetic phonics program. The following outline can serve as a practical general guide.

1. THE PRE-PHONICS STAGE

Before beginning to learn phonics in earnest (e. g. sound/letter correspondences), certain prerequisite skills need to be developed, including:

●

LISTENING SKILLS:

Children must be able to listen carefully to the sounds of speech. They must learn to filter speech sounds from other unrelated environmental sounds. This is usually best achieved by playing various listening games. When children have developed good aural comprehension, the game Simon Says is a fun way to further develop listening skills.

●

SOUND REPRODUCTION SKILLS:

Once the children have learned to discriminate between various sounds, they should learn to reproduce these themselves. This is usually achieved by modelling the sounds carefully for the children and encouraging them to copy these with particular attention paid to the shape of the mouth when making each sound. The popular fun game Telephone is excellent for this.

●

SEQUENCING SKILLS:

It is essential for children learning to read to be able to sequence not only the events of a story but the individual sounds of the words they hear. They must be able to recognize which sound comes before or after another. They should also be familiar with sequencing language such as first, second, before, after, then etc.

We have a complete guide to sequencing for teachers and students here.

2. SOUNDS AND ACTIONS

With our younger kids, it can be challenging to give them an anchor to ‘hold on to the sounds of language.

To help build such an anchor to these sounds, which will later help link sounds to written letters, actions are often connected to each sound to aid in memorizing them. This is especially useful in the early stages as it works well for the most basic of sounds.

For example, when making the /m/ sound, children could be taught to rub their tummies as if they have eaten something delicious while saying “mmmmm”.

Or, they could open their mouths wide as if they were eating an apple while saying the /a/ sound.

It is easy to devise customized actions to go along with the various sounds of English and then teach these to your class. Ensure you consistently use the same actions every time for a specific sound to avoid confusion.

Later, when students come to segment words into their individual sounds, they can use these actions to help recall them.

3. THE LETTER AND SOUNDS CORRESPONDENCES

Explicitly teaching the letter and sound correspondences lie at the heart of good phonics teaching.

It is essential to understand a little of the theory of synthetic phonics to be effective here. Here are a few important points to consider:

● Letter Names vs. Letter Sounds

It is crucial that children understand the difference between the names of the letters of the English alphabet and the sounds, as these are two very different things. For example, the letter c is called /see/ but the letter itself usually denotes either a /k/ or /s/ sound. It may seem obvious, but many teachers not trained in the teaching of phonics overlook this distinction and unwittingly make learning to read much more difficult for their students as a result.

● Letters Don’t Make The Sounds

As the limited letters used in English are needed to represent many different sounds, it’s important to point out to students that letters don’t make the sounds; they are simply an option for showing the sound. Often there will be more than one way to show the same sound; for example, the sound /s/ can be encoded in several different ways, including as s, c, and ps. When you are asking your students to write something, you can make the sound and ask them what letter they could use to show this sound. This type of phrasing reinforces the correct relationship between the letters and sounds.

● Avoid The Lazy Vowels

It is also important to remember that when teaching the letters and sounds to avoid making the lazy vowel or schwa sound at the end of a sound. For example, when pronouncing the /k/ sound, make it crisp and short, rather than adding in an extra -uh sound at the end. This will make it much easier for the students to blend sounds together later.

HOW TO PLAN A PHONICS LESSON FOR YOUR CLASS

The detail and delivery of your phonics lessons will depend greatly on the specific situation of your students. However, some general points will be helpful to consider when planning a phonics lesson for your class.

● Keep Phonics Lessons Short and Sweet

To avoid getting bogged down and boring your kids, keep phonics lessons short. In and around 10 to 15 minutes is ideal and no more than 20 minutes. Remember, we want our kids to be lifelong readers, and that means they need to enjoy it!

● Be Consistent

There is a lot of ground to cover here, and consistency is key. If your students are learning to read, they’ll need to practice and study their phonics every day – preferably at the same time each day too.

● Keep on Moving

While a lot of reinforcement will be required over the course of the year, research has shown that keeping a brisk pace through a phonics program achieves the best results. Don’t get bogged down waiting for everyone to get everything before moving on. You will be revisiting the material.

● Keep Things Fun!

Learning to read should be a positive experience, particularly as learning to read means acquiring one of the most empowering skills a child will ever have. To keep things fun, be sure to incorporate lots of enjoyable activities and games into your phonics lessons.

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Phonics Games and Activities

I Spy

This perennial classic is a fun way to get some phonics practice in. You can adapt it to say, “I spy with my little eye something beginning with…” and say a sound rather than a letter. If you wish to work on letter recognition rather than sound, simply hold up the letter itself quietly.

Sorting Activities

Sorting activities are a great way for students to practice their phonics knowledge and can take on an almost infinite number of variations. For example, younger kids may enjoy sorting objects into two hula hoops on the floor, which are labelled with their initial consonant sounds, while older kids might work on consonant blends.

Bingo

Bingo is another very versatile game that can be used to practice sound and letter recognition. Simply decide what you want to work on and place those into suitably sized grids (9×9 works well). These could be initial consonants, vowel digraphs, or pictures of nouns. If you set up some blank grids on laminated sheets, you can save yourself a lot of prep time too. Simply write a broad selection of sounds you are working on onto the whiteboard. Students can select 9 of them to fill in their laminated grid. Now each student will have their own unique bingo card!

Partner Reading

Partner reading is a great way to practice listening skills, as well as reading. Organize students into pairs and provide them each with a copy of the same text. One partner reads the text while the other follows closely with their own copy. The listening partner helps the reader decode difficult words when they have trouble. After a time, partners switch roles. This usually works best when partners are of a similar ability. You can further differentiate here by choosing different texts to suit the abilities of each pair.

Shared Writing

Shared writing is an effective means of introducing independent writing activities. For beginning students, it may take the form of simply spelling a basic CVC word together. For example, to work on the spelling of the word cat, you could draw three cradles on the whiteboard and say each sound; in turn, challenge the students to come up and write the corresponding letter in the cradle until they have written the word C – a – t.

As we can see, the teaching of phonics is a highly efficient and effective means of teaching our children to read and, ultimately, write. It works on training students to be able to hear the various sounds of English, identify these sounds, and link these sounds to the symbols we call letters.

While there are other methods of learning to read employed with emergent readers in the classroom, in two decades of teaching, I’ve never seen another methodology come anywhere close to phonics for overall effectiveness.

And, best of all, phonics can be a lot of fun to learn and teach too!

is ... What is the phonetics of the Russian language?

Phonetics is a branch of the science of language, the subject of which is sound. Sound is the basic unit of language along with the word and the sentence, but unlike them, it has no meaning by itself.

Phonetics and sound

Sounds play an important semantic role in the language. They form the word phonetically, creating its external sound shell.

Here is Wikipedia's definition of phonetics:

Phonetics (from Greek φωνή - “sound”, φωνηεντικός - “sound” ) is a branch of linguistics that studies the sounds of speech and the sound structure of the language (syllables, sound combinations, patterns of connecting sounds in a speech chain).

Sounds, combined in different combinations, help to distinguish words in speech. Each word contains a certain number of sounds. Compare:

boron - collection;
port - sport;
cat - window;
helmet — fairy tale

Words differ in the set of sounds and the sequence of their arrangement. Let's observe the words that differ

with one sound

wagon - flowerpot;
hike - approach;
city-garden;

two sounds

spoon - cover;
beans - password;
grease - putty.

In the phonetic appearance of words, we observe a difference in the sequence of sounds:

variety - torso;
lace kite;
box - threshold ([box] - [pair]).

Formation of sounds of language

Phonetics studies each sound from the point of view of acoustics, as a physical object, and articulation - a way of sound formation with the help of human speech organs. Sounds are formed in the speech apparatus when air is exhaled. The speech apparatus includes the larynx with vocal cords, oral and nasal cavities, tongue, lips, and palate.

Vowel sounds

In the speech apparatus, the exhaled air passes through the larynx between the tense vocal cords and through the oral cavity, which can change its shape. This is how vowels are formed: [a], [o], [y], [e], [i], [s].

They consist only of voice.

Consonants

Exhaled air can meet an obstruction in the oral cavity in the form of a closure or convergence of the speech organs and exit through the mouth or nose. This is how consonants are formed. They are made up of noise, and some are made up of voice and noise.

Image source: abv-stand.rf

Phonetic position of sound

In speech, all sounds are either in a strong position or in a weak one. In a strong position, the sound is heard clearly. For vowels, a strong position is finding the sound under stress, and a weak one is without stress, for example: position if there are vowels next to it:

beard, gate, hurricane, hand, table, closet, trails .

A weak position for consonants is their location

1. at the end of a word

prince [s ']

2. before voiceless consonants

ladle [k o f sh y k]
insert [f s t a f k a]

video tutorial “Phonetic transcription”

Video lesson “Phonetic analysis of the word”

Training material

The amount of vowels and consonants in Russian
How to remember the vowels
Is the consonant "l" voiced or voiceless?
Is the consonant "m" voiced or voiceless?
Is the consonant "n" voiced or voiceless?
Is the sound "ts" hard or soft, voiced or deaf?
Is the "ch" hard or soft?
The number of hissing sounds in Russian
How to find out how many sounds are in a word
Sound-letter (phonetic) analysis of the word
What is the alternation of sounds
Fluent vowels in the root, suffix and prefix

Lesson 1: Fundamentals of phonetic transcription

The Russian alphabet has 33 letters (graphemes) that can be divided into consonants and vowels . Each grapheme has its own sound form, called phoneme , which may have other variants (allophones).

The consonants are generated by a jet of air passing through the vocal cords, causing them to vibrate, which forms clear sound (tone). This tone is further modified in the oral and nasal cavities, in which there are obstructions and noise occurs. Consonants can be divided by voiced (in addition to noise they also contain tone) and deaf (contain only noise). Further, we divide the consonants into hard and soft . In Russian, there are 15 steam hard and soft consonants, 3 consonants are always hard - these are “sh”, “zh” and “c” and 3 consonants always soft "h", "u" and "y". In total, we distinguish 36 consonant phonemes.

Vowels are also formed when air passes through the vocal cords, which forms a tone that is modified into a nasal and oral cavities, but in the absence of obstructions, so that a pure tone is maintained. There are 6 vowel phonemes in Russian: |a|, |e|, |u|, |s|, |o|, |y| , which have their own variants - allophones, depending on the position of the vowel in relation to the stress in the word.

Russian accent free, movable. It can be on any syllable in a word, it is not constant and in one word it can be on different syllables, for example. window - windows, city-cities.

Russian stress is strong, dynamic, the substressed vowel qualitatively and quantitatively is much stronger than the unstressed, which pronounced much weaker. The weakening of unstressed vowels is called reduction and 2 degrees of reduction are distinguished.

Russian vowels in relation to stress can be divided into:

3 - percussion (strong, dynamic, long)
2 - first pre-shock (1 reduction stage)
1 - more than the first pre-shock and post-shock (2nd degree of reduction).

Pronunciation table of Russian vowels and their recording in transcription

Vowels after consonants:

Grapheme	Phoneme	Options	in relation to	positions in a word
		3	2 9] at the end of a word	['b]
e	\| 'e\|	['e']	['and]	['b]
e	\|' o\|	['ó]	–	–
e	\|e\|	[e']	[s]	[b]
y	\|y\|	[ý]	[y]	[y]
	\|'y\|	['ý]	['y]	['y]
and	\|'and\|	['and'], [s]	['and], [s]	[' and], [s]
s	\|s\|	[s]	[s]	[s]

"I", "e", "ё", "yu", "and" after vowels, at the beginning of a word or after a soft and hard sign: Grapheme Phoneme Variants according to in relation to positions in a word 9] at the end of a word [ṷь] e |j|+|e| [je] [ṷi] [ṷь] e |j|+|o| [jo] – – y |j|+|y| [ju] [ṷу] [ṷу] and |j|+|and| [ji] [ṷi] [ṷi]

Transcription of some consonants:

Exercise

Exercise 1.

Read and rewrite in transcriptions:

Moms, Bábushka, Milk, Knight, Pine, Supervision, Crocodes and L, Chocolate, Shark, Laughter, Gorod, Young, General, Govor and 22 and 22 , saying, mash and on, brownie, contract, school, frying pan, open s tka, stop, aroma, car and l.

Tree, knee, birch, girl, spring, business, timber truck, translation, phone, tele and zor, inspector, director, serial, furniture, attic, suitcase, man, d i ya, aunt, salary and nya.

Apple, Yantár, Yaponia, I on, Yaroslv, Yaz s K, I mA, I , Yavalniy, January I Snaya, Evrena, éva, EG and and and pet, European, edem, food, hedgehog, herringbone, spruce, Egor, éli, y bka, s zhny, yulá, s

Seven i , trees, mo i , green, Tat i on, comma, d i con, Dar i , mar and i, summer her, bad weather, happiness, health, move out, move in, go, yours yu , from and nyu, I do, my yu , Ra and sa, Zina and yes, mo and , own and , operations, laboratories.

ride, work out, bathe, dress, study and wash, contract and he smiles, she is shy and is gone.

Key

Exercise 1.2

Rewrite in transcription:

Today after the lessons we will go to the park.

Mo and genus and tel hot i t go to the sea in Er and pet.

Boys l y play ice hockey in winter.

Father and son will go fishing together tomorrow.

Our aunt and d and from Prague will come to visit us.

What time do you have and on your watch?

I want to go boating on our lake.

Who did their homework without osh 9s':e ṷ n]

Key

Literature

The lesson was prepared using the following literature:

Theoretical part

[1]Oliverius, Z.