What are phonemes?
Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in spoken words. Graphemes are the letters or combinations of letters used to represent those sounds in writing. Teaching children to connect phonemes with graphemes is essential for learning to read and spell in English.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in spoken language. When teaching children to read, we help them understand which letters match each sound.
For example, the word “hat” has three phonemes:
/h/ – /a/ – /t/
These are the individual sounds we hear when we say the word.
A grapheme is the letter—or group of letters—that represents a phoneme in writing. In other words, graphemes are how we write the sounds we hear.
English has a complex writing system, and a single phoneme can be represented by a grapheme made up of 1, 2, 3 or even 4 letters.
For instance:
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/f/ can be written as f or ph
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/ai/ can be written as ai, ay, a-e, or eigh
Understanding the link between phonemes and graphemes is a key part of learning to read and spell.