Phonics

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Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing to beginners. To use phonics is to teach the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters (graphemes) or groups of letters or syllables of the written language. Phonics is also known as the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code.^[1] It can be used with any writing system that is alphabetic, such as that of English, Russian, and most other languages. Phonics is also sometimes used as part of the process of teaching Chinese people (and foreign students) to read and write Chinese characters, which are not alphabetic, using pinyin, which is alphabetic.^[2][3][4][5]

While the principles of phonics generally apply regardless of the language or region, the examples in this article are from General American English pronunciation. For more about phonics as it applies to British English, see Synthetic phonics, a method by which the student learns the sounds represented by letters and letter combinations, and blends these sounds to pronounce words.^[6]

Phonics is taught using a variety of approaches, for example:

• learning individual sounds and their corresponding letters (e.g., the word cat has three letters and three sounds c - a - t, (in IPA: /k/, /æ/, /t/), whereas the word flower has six letters but four sounds: f - l - ow - er, (IPA /f/, /l/, /aʊ/, /ər/),^[7] or
• learning the sounds of letters or groups of letters, at the word level, such as similar sounds (e.g., cat, can, call), or rimes (e.g., hat, mat and sat have the same rime, "at"), or consonant blends (also consonant clusters in linguistics) (e.g., bl as in black and st as in last), or syllables (e.g., pen-cil and al-pha-bet),^[8] or
• having students read books, play games and perform activities that contain the sounds they are learning.^{[9][10][11][12]}