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Writer's pictureKate Papageorgiou

What is phonics?

Updated: Feb 26, 2022

Phonics is segmenting and blending to assist reading and spelling. Looking at onset and rime. Looking at spelling patterns and spelling rules. Looking at prefixes, suffixes and roots of words. Looking at the origin of the words and how that affects the spelling of them. Etymology. Looking at how a word was in the present tense and how turning it in the past tense may affect how it is spelled - eg say. try - tried say - said (y changed to i to add ed. Pronunciation shift.) Looking at consonant blends, digraphs, trigraphs etc. Looking at things like a detached open syllable with a long vowel sound Why and when and which letters are doubled. Looking at vowel digraphs and split digraphs These are all phonics.




What is not phonics; guess this word form the context of the sentence. look at the first letter and guess this word. Look at the picture and guess this word. Just guess this word form its shape. This is not phonics. If this or the use of flash cards for words and word recognition or the use of unrelated spelling lists is being used, your teacher is not using phonics and your child will continue to struggle wondering why they are no good at this psycholinguistic guessing game.


Those who don't have dyslexia appear to be able to pick it up for themselves, but those with it cannot.

Those with dyslexia need to be taught using phonics.


Those with dyslexia often struggle to succeed.

Those with dyslexia are the ones who will be failed if the government gives into this pressure to remove the phonics teaching approach in the UK

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