The BIG SIX: What is Phonics?

The second main pillar of reading is phonics. Phonics is the relationship between letters or groups of letters (graphemes) with sounds (phonemes). Its instruction supports the connectivity between the brain’s phonological and orthographic processors. Phonics education should build automaticity in matching graphemes to phonemes through systematic, explicit instruction. While some students will seemingly learn the code implicitly, it is important to realize that even those students who seem to decode with little effort WILL benefit from the explicit teaching of phonics. 

Phonics begins with developing the alphabetic principle or the ability to associate sounds with letters and use those sounds to form words. Initial activities include recognizing upper and lowercase letters and knowing that words are made up of letters representing sounds.  

Word analysis is the use of phonics skills in order to decode or encode words. Decoding is the ability to take apart the sounds in words (segmenting) and blending sounds together. This skill allows readers to sound out and read words. Encoding is the opposite, it is the process of breaking a spoken word into each of its individual sounds (phonemes) to write words. Below is a strategy I use to teach encoding in my intervention groups. As you can see the encoding and decoding skill overlaps during instruction.

There are many phonics skills that should be taught systematically, explicitly, and cumulatively. In the table below, I have highlighted these skills and provided a brief example of each. 

Short vowels	cat
Single consonants	bed
Consonant blends	class, black, flower, crash, drive, tree, space, stick, twice, screw, straw, thred
Consonant digraphs	champ, shark, thumb, whale, photo, sang
Inflectional endings	packed, rested, jogged; camping; mixes, skips
Consonant trigraphs	bridge, night, catch
Long vowels (final -e and vowel teams)	cake, tie, chain, pay, road, wheel, leaf
R controlled vowels	car, germ, bird, corn, fur
Diphthongs	boil, boy, ouch, cow, laugh
Silent letters	gnome, character, knot, comb, castle
Hard/soft consonants	good/general; cup/city
Schwa	pleasant, celebrate, freedom
Syllables	cab/in, ba/sic, rab/bit
Morphemes	un/read/able

Phonics instruction also includes phonetically irregular words or words that do not follow typical phonetic rules (for example: gnat, porpoise, ogre, aisle, paradigm).

In the next post we will dig a little deeper into the importance of phonics in reading instruction and when to teach each skill.