Phonograms? Phonemes? I just want my child to learn to read!

Now learn your ABC's right quick,
Or go get walloped with a stick.

This rather threatening verse in the classic book Heidi appears when the little Swiss girl begins to teach her goat herding friend Peter to read.  He is more than a little intimidated!  (Yes, I know, Heidi was not originally written in English, but it's the same idea.)  Learning to read and write in English can indeed seem a daunting task.  People point to sentences such as

 

and decide that the language is simply "not phonetic," therefore impossible.

It's not, really.  English is phonetic.  It uses letters to represent sounds, and these letters are written in the order that the sounds appear when the word is spoken.  It's not as straightforward as a reading Spanish, of course, in which each letter has a single sound, but for that you can blame all the early settlers and conquerors of the inhabitants of the little island known as England.  They all left their marks on the language.

The problem, then, is that you can't simply learn 26 letters and sounds and be done with learning to read, much less to spell.  Last time I counted, there were about 70 phonograms in the English language.

A phonogram is the written representation of a single vocal sound-- a letter or combination of letters  (from the Greek:  phono=sound + gram=writing).  The letters "ph" make a phonogram for the sound  /f/.  A phoneme is a distinct vocal sound, like /f/, /ah/ or /sh/, that you combine with others to speak words.  A baby's first word is often a combination of two phonemes, /m/ and /ah/, repeated: "mama."

Although phonograms and phonemes are different things, every spoken word will have as many phonemes as there are phonograms when the word is written.  There is a 1:1 correspondence-- in the word "cat," for example, when spoken, there are three distinct sounds /k/ /a/ /t/ each represented by a single letter in the written word.  Three phonemes, three phonograms.

The confusion for reading and spelling English stems from the following issues:

1. Many phonemes can be spelled in several different ways;  and
2. Many phonograms can represent more than one sound.

For example, the single letter "a" is a phonogram for the vowel sound in the words April, amber, and all.  Meanwhile, the sound /ay/ can be represented by a, ay, ai, ei, and eigh.

So how do you teach a child to read English without confusing him?  Should you teach him all the phonograms and each sound they can represent, or should you teach him all the phonemes and all the ways they can be spelled?

Well, if done correctly, the child eventually ends up with the same information either way.  And in general, you're going to start off simply, introducing a few short words with distinct phonemes that can be represented by single-letter phonograms.  Cat, bat, sat.  So in the beginning, it isn't a huge issue.

Sometimes where you go from there depends on which curriculum you use.  For example, The Writing Road to Reading is organized by phonograms.  The student learns all the sounds represented by "a," all the sounds represented by "b," all the sounds represented by "ough," and everything in between.  On the other hand, Reading Reflex focuses more on the phonemes.  The student learns all the ways to spell the long /a/ sound, the /k/ sound, etc.  You may prefer one or the other, or a combination of both.

Still, 70 phonograms!  That seems like a lot.  But it is not all done in a single week, or even a single year.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  (A very user-friendly way to eat the elephant is the new Spelling You See program.  I have only seen the samples online, but they look excellent!)

Which bite you offer first is up to you.  My favorite introduction to reading is Dr Seuss' ABC.  It introduces the basic alphabet and the concept of letter-sound representation, and throws in those very important rhymes that are essential to developing phonemic awareness.  But wherever you start, you can make it fun!

Here's where the hands-on part comes in.  When a child is beginning to read, she can increase her mastery of the reading and spelling when she:

1. manipulates letter tiles or puzzle pieces to represent the sounds in the order they occur as they are spoken:

The moveable letters are perfect for showing how rhyming patterns work.  Simply by changing out a tile, you can turn "dish" into "fish,"  "dawn" into "pawn."  Internal and end sounds can be changed, too, so that the student learns to focus on each phonogram in the word-- "dish" and "dash" are different words, as are "fish" and "fin."  When the student has mastered three-phoneme words, he can combine them to make compound words: pigpen, dishpan.  Later he can use the tiles to break longer words into syllables:  car pen ter,  so fa, sing er.

2. forms phonograms out of clay, string, or pipe cleaners to spell words;

In this case, you might have the child form the letters to spell "pan."  Then have him add the sound /t/ at the end and read the new word.  Finally, he can add the /s/ and have another word.  This kind of word-building is used in the series Sequential Spelling, which has wonderful lists of words that students learn to spell one sound at a time.

3. writes letters in a tray of sand or baking soda as she says each distinct sound of a word;

Writing in the sand is a also great way to work on the fine-motor skills of forming letters.  Just be sure the student is forming the letters correctly!  If your child struggles with printing or cursive, a great handwriting program that is developed by a physical therapist is Handwriting Without Tears.

4. divides words into syllables and mark each distinct phonogram in a word by circling or underlining with a separate color.  In this example, the student has first divided all the multi-syllable words, then circled all the multi-letter phonograms (missing the "ee" in Queen), and has begun to mark the separate single-letter phonograms:

The pencil-marking activities are probably best done after a student has had practice using the letter tiles.  What you have your student marking depends on what they have learned.   Some reading programs have the student indicating certain spelling rules they recognize in the words. In Writing Road,  for example, the students learn 5 reasons for using a "silent e," and when they find one they underline it twice and identify it with a number, 1-5.  They also number different sounds for multi-sound phonograms:  the ch in "choir" gets a 2, the ch in "Charlotte" gets a 3.

Each of these four techniques can be used during different practice sessions, to reinforce the student's mastery of phonogram-phoneme patterns.  Some activities may be more beneficial than others for particular students at different points in their learning.  For example, the clay models of the letters are suggested in Ron Davis' book The Gift of Dyslexia because, as he theorizes, the dyslexic student sees the letters 3-dimensionally, and forming them in clay helps the brain transition from the 3-D image to the printed 2-D version.  So this might be a critical activity for certain children. On the other hand, you wouldn't expect a beginner to take a pencil and mark all the phonograms in an entire paragraph.  But all of these activities can help the child focus on the details of the words, add variety and interest, and ultimately make the student a better reader and speller.


A complete list of phonograms (accurate to the degree that your dialect of English matches mine) can be found here.