Glossary of terms
“Tricky words” or common exception words: Tricky words are words that cannot be ‘sounded-out’ but need to be learned by heart. They don’t fit into the usual spelling patterns. In order to read simple sentences, it is necessary for children to know some words that have unusual or untaught spellings.
High Frequency words: High frequency (common) are words that recur frequently in much of the written material young children read and that they need when they write.
Phoneme: (fo-neem): Basic building blocks of words i.e. the sounds we learn to make up words. A phoneme makes one sound.
Digraph:(die-graph): Two letters making one sound (sh; th; ng)
Vowel digraph: Two vowels that make up one sound (oa; ee; ie)
Spilt digraph: When a vowel digraph is spilt by a constant, but pronounced as if they are together. bake (ae); wrote (oe); these (ee)
Adjacent Consonants: Two consonants next to each other that make two different sounds (stop grab bend). Three adjacent consonants are called a consonant string (scrap).
Grapheme: (gra-f-eem): A letter or letters that represent a sound. Essentially how we write. ‘f and ph’ = /f/ ‘igh’ = /ie/ (like eye). Some phonemes can be spelled with many different graphemes: /ee/: ee, ea, ie, ei, e, e-e, y
Segment: Splitting a word into its individual phonemes in order to spell it.
Blend: To draw individual sounds together to pronounce a word.