What is phonics?

Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing of the English language by developing learners' phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes—in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them.

The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out, or, in phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns. Since it focuses on the spoken and written units within words, phonics is a sublexical approach and, as a result, is often contrasted with whole language, a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading.

Since the turn of the 20th century, phonics has been widely used in primary education and in teaching literacy throughout the English-speaking world.



Teacher and parent, James Clements, introduces the key aspects of learning to read using phonics. Great for learning more about key terms such as ‘phonemes’, ‘blending’ and ‘tricky words’.



Phonics Books For Reference:

Alpha Phonics