Glossary

Grapheme

A grapheme is the written representation of a sound. This can be a single letter or a combination of letters because there are more sounds in the English language than there are letters in the alphabet. This is why sh represents the single sound |sh|.

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound in a word, e.g. the three sounds in rain, |r|-|ae|-|n| are represented by the graphemes r-ai-n.

Digraph

Two letters representing one phoneme (sound). There are consonant digraphs e.g. |sh| as in ship and vowel digraphs e.g. |ow| as in down.

Trigraph

Three letters representing a sound, e.g. l-igh-t, y-ear, h-air.

Vowel

A phoneme produced without audible closure.

Short Vowels

a, e, i, o, u as in c-a-t, b-e-d, t-i-n, h-o-p, s-u-n

Long Vowels

These vowels sound like the letter names A, E, I, O, U. The most common ways to write these are:

ai, (rain) ay, (day) ee, (see) ea, (dream) ie, (pie) igh, (night) y, (sky) oa, (boat) ow, (yellow) ue, (rescue) ew, (new), oo (zoom).

and the split digraph or 'magic e': a-e (cake), e-e (these), i-e (bike), o-e (nose), u-e (tune).

Consonants

A sound produced by using lips, tongue and teeth to cause some friction. The following letters are consonants:

b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, z,

The letter 'y' can act as a consonant or vowel. It is a consonant in the words y-e-s, y-ear, but it is a vowel in the word J-e-ll-y and in the word s-k-y.

Consonant digraphs

Two different letters representing a consonant sound, e.g. ch (chip), sh (shop), th (this), ng (bang), ck (neck).

English Vowel digraphs

As well as the long vowel digraphs above, other vowel digraphs are:

ar (car), ou (out), ow (down), ur (curl), ir (bird), er (water), oi (soil), oy (boy), or (for), aw (saw).

English Vowel trigraphs

These include air (hair), are (stare), ear (dear).

Segmenting

To break a word down into its phonemes, e.g. c-a-t, sh-i-p, n-ee-d,

Blending

The process of combining phonemes together in the order in which they appear in a word from left to right. i.e synthesizing.

High Frequency Words

These are the words used most often in written English. These include:

the, and, to, of, a, in, on, I, is, it, for, not, no, he, with, that, as, you, do, be, my, we, he, she, have, they.

Most of these are short words and they are used to join other meaningful words in sentences.

Decode

Decoding is the process of looking at the graphemes in a word, knowing the phoneme correspondences for each, and then being able to say the word.

Encode

Encoding is the process of writing down the graphemes of the phonemes heard in a word.

Decodable text

This is written text that children can decode using the phonic skills they have already been taught.

Rose Review

This is the independent review of the teaching of reading in primary schools commissioned by the government in June 2005 and led by Jim Rose. The final report was published on 20th March 2006. Its recommendations have been incorporated in the renewed Primary Framework for Literacy.