What is the difference between phonics and spelling

If students are able to manipulate phonemes orally, they will be able to transfer these skills to reading and writing during phonics instruction. Once students are engaged in phonics instruction, we can see the evidence of phonemic awareness skills in their reading and spelling.

Educators and parents can observe students blending sounds together to read words or turning unknown words into automatic sight words by quickly manipulating phonemes e. When students write, we can look at their spelling and see the sounds they are hearing in words. Oftentimes, our younger readers and writers hear the first and last sounds in words before the medial sounds — they might spell the word cat as ct.

Analyzing writing and spelling helps us guide our instruction on which phonemic awareness skills students still need instruction in. While phonemic awareness instruction transfers to reading and writing, we do not need to wait to teach it.

Students can engage in phonemic awareness lessons before they know their letters and sounds. While phonemic awareness is oral and auditory, phonics instruction is both visual and auditory.

The focus of phonics instruction is letter-sound relationships. During explicit phonics instruction students are taught the letter or letter combinations that represent the 44 sounds or phonemes in the English language.

As students match letters or letter combinations to the sounds they hear in words, they apply the phonemic awareness skills of blending, segmenting, and manipulating phonemes with the print that represents each sound.

In this way, phonemic awareness is connected to phonics. When students know the sounds the letters they see in print make, they are able to blend or manipulate those sounds to read words. When spelling, students hear the whole word, segment the word into sounds and match the letter or letter combinations to the sound it makes.

While it is true that English is not always predictable, it is still an alphabetic language with many consistencies. Additionally, many of the irregular words are only often irregular by one phoneme only. Many of those words are function words like the and an. To understand the importance of phonemic awareness and phonics, we must first understand that reading is not natural.

We do not learn to read the same way we learn to speak. In fact, reading is relatively new when we compare the amount of time humans have been communicating orally to when reading first came on the scene.

Such is not the case with reading and writing. If it were, there would not be illiterate children in the world. It is essential to explicitly teach students how sounds in words work phonemic awareness and how those sounds connect to the letters they see in print phonics. Phonemic Awareness instruction does not replace phonics instruction, but rather, both skills are necessary when teaching students to decode words accurately and automatically.

Thus, children need solid phonemic awareness training for phonics instruction to be effective. According to the research brief completed by the EAB, reading instruction in kindergarten through third grade should have a greater focus on word decoding until students become fluent readers. Log in through your institution. The Reading Teacher is a peer-reviewed journal serving teachers and literacy professionals interested in the teaching of reading to children in the elementary classroom.

The journal offers teaching tips, application of research to classroom practice, thought-provoking commentaries, book and resources reviews, and more. The International Literacy Association is a professional membership organization dedicated to promoting high levels of literacy for all by improving the quality of reading instruction, disseminating research and information about reading, and encouraging the lifetime reading habit.

Members include classroom teachers, reading specialists, consultants, administrators, supervisors, university faculty, researchers, psychologists, librarians, media specialists, and parents. Examples include st uff , gr ass , f uzz , and sh ell. Exceptions include qu iz and b us. The exceptions to this rule are s uch , m uch , r ich , and wh ich. When words end with a silent e , drop the e before adding - ing. This rule also applies to other suffixes that start with vowels, like - ed , - er , - able , and - ous.

In a one-syllable word like win where one short vowel is followed by one consonant, double the consonant before adding a suffix that starts with a vowel. Examples: wi nn er, wi nn ing, wi nn able. But when a singular word ends with s , sh , ch , x , or z , add es to make it plural, as in class es , brush es , and fox es. When y immediately follows a consonant, change the y to i and add es. Suffixes follow a similar set of y rules. When a word ends with a consonant followed immediately by y , change the y to i before adding suffixes like - ed and - est.

Most words in the English language follow phonics rules. But any exceptions to these rules need to be taught and memorized for reading and spelling. These words are often found on lists of sight words or high-frequency words. If your child is struggling with reading or spelling , talk to the teacher. An extra scoop of phonics instruction could help your child catch up. Without this insight, phonics instruction will not make sense to students. Activities, games, and lessons that help students learn early reading, spelling, and verbal skills.

Create a List. List Name Save. Rename this List. Rename this list. List Name Delete from selected List. Save to. Save to:. Save Create a List. Create a list. Save Back. Understanding Phonics By Wiley Blevins. Grades PreK—K , 1—2 , 3—5.