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Synthetic Phonics Glossary
At first the specialist terminology of synthetic phonics can be daunting but don’t worry it will soon become first-hand. As in other areas of learning, using the terminology is a big step towards understanding the whole process. This is why the technical terms are taught explicitly to the children, who will soon pick them up and use them confidently.
Phonic knowledge is only the first step toward reading. If reading is to become fluent then children need to recognise words quickly and automatically. In order to gain meaning from a text, children must read it fluently. That is why Get Reading Right encourages games like Fast Read.
Also called ‘tricky’ or ‘irregular, high-frequency words’. These are words which children may find difficult to read and spell when the phonic knowledge and skills are not yet learnt. These are words which cannot yet be easily decoded. The child must look at the word and see if he or she knows any of the phonemes and then go on to remember the tricky, irregular part. Each level of the Get Reading Right guided reading books has a camera book to teach these words. Learn more about camera words.
The process of decoding a word has two stages. Firstly the individual grapheme-phoneme correspondence is recognised and then the phonemes are blended or synthesised into the word as it is read. Reading (blending) and spelling (segmenting) are reversible processes that are taught simultaneously in synthetic phonics.
A digraph is a two-letter grapheme that makes one sound. For example /sh/ makes one sound in ‘shop’ and the vowel digraph /oa/ makes one sound in ‘boat’.
Synthetic Phonics teaches children that the English alphabetic code is reversible; if you can read a word you can spell it. Encoding involves listening for the sounds and deciding which letters represent those phonemes. Also known as spelling!
Fidelity is important in teaching synthetic phonics in a systematic way. All the 44 phonemes should be taught and this should be done in a way that allows each step to build on the previous one. You should not deviate from The Synthetic Phonics Toolkit phoneme sequence.
For spelling and reading children need to know which sounds (phonemes) correspond to which letters (graphemes) and vice versa. For instance, there are two GPCs for the digraph /oo/ as in ‘moon’ or in ‘book’.
Homographs are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings (and may or may not have different pronunciations). This is important because children need to use more than their phonic knowledge to read these words. Homographs must be read in the context of a phrase or sentence. For example the word, ‘read’, how you pronounce it depends on the context. He read that whole book! I like to read in bed.
These are high frequency words which cannot be decoded easily, at this stage in a child’s learning. They require two skills: phoneme knowledge and visual memory for the “tricky” part. Get Reading Right calls them camera words because we believe this is a more child friendly term. It also reminds children that they must use their visual memory by taking a ‘picture’ in their mind of the part that cannot be easily decoded. Read more about camera words.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word; it is a term that children need to learn. At the beginning of the programme it will be represented by one letter; later on it may be represented by two, three or even four letters.
The ‘synthetic’ element refers to the blending or synthesising of sounds to make a word. Synthetic phonics emphasise the structure of the written language and teaches it in a systematic and thorough fashion.
In the Toolkit we include some common abbreviations. These include: VC, CVC, CCVC and CVCC. In these abbreviations, the V stands for a vowel and C for a consonant.
For example: VC - it, CVC - cat, CCVC - stop, CVCC - lamp
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