All Aboard Phonics Glossary - Resource

The "All Aboard Phonics Glossary" is a resourceful guide that provides clear definitions of key terms used in the teaching of phonics. It begins with 'Alliteration', the repetition of the same onset sound in a phrase, such as "Betty bought a bit of butter". The term 'Allophone' is explained as variations in the pronunciation of phonemes, which change depending on their position in a word and the surrounding phonemes. An example given is the different articulations of the phoneme /l/ in British dialects. 'Blending' is described as the process of combining individual sounds to form a word, a fundamental skill in reading. The glossary also defines 'CVC', a basic word structure standing for consonant-vowel-consonant, with variations like CVCC and CCVC for words like "hunt" and "slip" respectively.

'Decoding' is another crucial term, referring to the process of reading by identifying phonemes for each grapheme and blending them to form words. This eventually becomes a subconscious skill with practice. 'Digraph' is defined as a two-letter grapheme that represents a single sound, such as and . The concept of 'Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence' (GPC) is introduced to explain the relationship between graphemes and the sounds they represent, which is not unique and can represent different sounds in different words. 'Grapheme' itself is a written symbol for a phoneme, which can consist of one to four letters. The glossary continues with terms like 'Letter Name', 'Oral Blending', 'Oral Segmenting', 'Phoneme', 'Phonemic Awareness', 'Pictophone', 'Segmenting (for spelling)', 'Sound Button or Bar', 'SSP (Systematic Synthetic Phonics)', 'Tricky Words', and 'Trigraph', each providing a foundational understanding for the teaching and learning of phonics.