The Secondary Quick Guide to Phonics
Transition between primary and secondary school is key, not only for our pupils as they
move into the bustling world of Key Stage 3, but also for us as teachers. As colleagues with
the same aspirations for those pupils, we (primary and secondary teachers) can learn so
much from each other. In the spirit of true reciprocal learning, we offer The Secondary
Quick Guide to Phonics, knowing that in coming weeks we will be drawing on our
secondary colleagues’ expertise when looking at the complexities of reading
comprehension.
The Secondary Quick Guide to Phonics shares with secondary teachers some essential
expertise from their primary counterparts concerning phonics. Phonics is a familiar part of
the primary curriculum, but is still relevant at secondary, particularly with pupils who reach
Key Stage 3 without having secured those key building blocks of reading and spelling.
1. Getting to grips with terminology
The Basics
Q
A
What is a phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a
word that can change its meaning.
What is a grapheme?
A grapheme is the written representation of
a phoneme; that is, a letter or group of
letters representing a sound.
There is always the same number of
graphemes in a word as phonemes.
It is generally agreed that there are 44
phonemes in spoken English.
How many phonemes does English have?
What is phonological awareness?
What is phonemic awareness?
What is grapheme-phoneme
correspondence?
What is blending and segmenting?
The ability to perceive and manipulate the
sounds of spoken words. It includes the
smallest level, phonemes, but also larger
units such as rimes and syllables.
The ability to perceive and manipulate the
phonemes in spoken words.
The relationship between the graphemes
(letters) and phonemes (sounds) they
represent.
Blending is to draw individual sounds
together to pronounce a word and
segmenting is the splitting up of words into
their individual phonemes and to select the
graphemes for each phoneme in order to
spell the word.
We blend to read and segment to spell
Copyright © National Literacy Trust (The secondary quick guide to phonics).
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The English language consists of approximately 44 sounds, or “phonemes”, represented by
26 letters. Phonemes in English can be represented in different ways.
For example: the /s/ sound in sock is represented by c in city; the /k/ sound in kit can be
represented by c in cat, ch in chorus, ck in back, and cc in account.
In spite of this, the alphabetic system is efficient: 26 letters creating 44 phonemes in 144
combinations to form about half a million words in current use. The English alphabet
includes 21 consonants; spoken English uses 24 consonant sounds, so the match between
how we say a consonant and how we write it is generally predictable. Often, for secondary
pupils, it is the rich array of long vowels which pose particular problems. English has 20
spoken vowel sounds but only five vowel letters; for example, the long /ai/ sound might be
represented by ai, a-e, ea, ay, or eigh.
The table below represents the most familiar phonemes-to-graphemes correspondence for
vowels:
Taken from Appendix 2, Page 21 of Letters and Sounds Notes of Guidance. Crown Copyright 2007
Copyright © National Literacy Trust (The secondary quick guide to phonics).
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Drilling Down Further
Q
A
What is a digraph?
Two letters which combine to represent one
sound.
e.g. chip, stick, train
There are consonant digraphs - ch
and vowel digraphs - ai
What is a trigraph?
Three letters representing one sound
e.g. hedge, hair, snatch
What is the difference between a consonant Consonant clusters are two or three letters
cluster and a consonant digraph?
making two or three individual consonant
sounds
e.g. strict, blow
A consonant digraph is two consonant
letters making one sound
e.g. flick, when
Vowel digraphs are two letters which
combine to represent one vowel sound
e.g. out, boat, audit
What is a split vowel digraph?
Split vowel digraphs have a consonant
separating the two vowels
e.g. bite, hope, tube
Vowel pairs: u-e, o-e, a-e, i-e, etc.
For pupils, the skills are two-fold:
1. the ability to segment words into their individual phonemes
2. the ability and confidence in their knowledge of how to represent those phonemes
with the correct choice of graphemes which is at the heart of phonics
At a simple level, phoneme counting and matching the corresponding graphemes looks like
this:
Word
Number of
Phonemes
Split the word
into phonemes
Word
Number of
Phonemes
Split the word
into phonemes
that
3
/th/a/t/
dress
4
/d/r/e/ss/
ship
3
/sh/i/p/
scrap
5
/s/c/r/a/p/
thing
3
/th/i/ng/
flop
4
/f/l/o/p/
splash
5
/s/p/l/a/sh/
stand
5
/s/t/a/n/d/
day
2
/d/ay/
make
3
/m/a/k/e*
*a and e form a single split vowel digraph
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As we get more complex, the choice of graphemes becomes wider. However, if pupils are
specifically taught the different choices (see the table on page three - vowel phonemes to
graphemes correspondence), they will become confident and familiar with their selections
and spelling becomes demystified.
Therefore, when faced with more complex words as below, they are able to segment and
choose from their knowledge of individual graphemes (represented by . ), digraphs and
trigraphs (represented by _ ) and split digraphs (represented by ͡ ).
Copyright © National Literacy Trust (The secondary quick guide to phonics).
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