Reading terminology, ideas and concepts lesson 2 Flashcards
What is a phoneme?
The smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances (an individual sound in a word)
What is a grapheme?
A fundamental unit in a written language. Examples include alphabetic letters, numerical digits and punctuation marks. Children have to learn all of these when they learn to read.
What is a morpheme?
The smallest component of a word, or other linguistic unit, that has semantic meaning. They can be free or bound. (e.g. cats is made up of the free morpheme and the bound morpheme which means more than one. Together they mean more than one cat)
How many phonemes are there in the English language?
There are 44 phonemes.
How many vowel phonemes are there in the English language?
There are 20 vowel phonemes.
How many consonant phonemes are there in the English language?
There are 24 consonant phonemes.
How many letters in the alphabet?
There are 26 letters in the alphabet.
What is the ‘look and say’ or whole word approach?
In the whole word approach, children learn the shape of words, not breaking them down phonologically. Flashcards with individual words on them are used for this method, often with a relevant picture, so that the child can link them together.
What is phonics?
Children learn the different sounds made by different letters and letter blends and some rules of putting them together.
What is a letter blend?
Certain combinations of two or more consonant letters are called letter blends. Some examples include bl, sm, tw, gr, etc.
What is a digraph?
A digraph is two graphemes (letters) that make one phoneme (sound). The digraph can be made up of vowels or consonants. Examples include ck, kn, th and oo, ee, oa.
What is analytic phonics?
Traditionally, children were taught to read using ‘analytic phonics’. Children learnt to break down whole words into phonemes or graphemes and to look for phonetic or orthographical patterns. They learnt to decode words by breaking them up into smaller units, such as onset (the start of the word) and rime (the rest of the word starting with a vowel). They used rhyme to learn words with similar patterns e.g. p-a-t, c-a-t.
What is synthetic phonics?
Nowadays, children are taught using synthetic phonics, which is much more systematic. They remember the 44 phonemes and their related graphemes. They learn to recognise each grapheme, sound out each phoneme in a word and blend the sounds together to produce the word phonetically. Phonemes are memorised quickly, often using a multi-sensory approach.
What are the advantages of the look and say or whole word approach?
Some words are not phonetically regular and have to be learnt this way: most, who
What are the disadvantages of the look and say or whole word approach?
Children cannot decode words they haven’t seen before
