Students must learn to match a unit of sound (a phoneme) to the letter or letters that stand for the sound (a grapheme). Understanding letter-sound relationships and using them to decode words is the foundation of...

Phonics is the basis for decoding, or what’s often called “sounding out” words. Decoding is what happens when a reader looks at a word in print and uses the sounds of each letter to figure out what it says. Phonics...

A phoneme is a speech sound. It’s the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another. Since sounds cannot be written, we use letters to represent or stand for the sounds. A grapheme is the written...