Phonics and Phonemic Awareness Glossary

Dance Phonics has compiled this brief glossary of terms related to phonics and phonemic awareness to help parents and teachers better understand the terminology and how they related to oral language development and reading.

• Blending — Combining parts of a spoken word into a whole representation of the word. For example, /p/ /oo/ /l/ can be blended together to form the word POOL.
• Onset-Rime—The onset is the part of a word before the vowel. Not all words have onsets. The rime is the part of the word including the vowel and what follows it.
• Phoneme — The vocal gestures from which words are constructed in a language; the smallest unit of speech that serves to distinguish one utterance from another (e.g. RAT and bAT are distinguished by the initial phoneme).
  Phoneme awareness — The ability to hear and manipulate the sounds of spoken words and the knowledge that spoken words and syllables are made up of a sequence of individual sounds.
• Phonics — An approach to reading instruction that emphasizes letter-sound relationships and generalized principles that describe spelling-sound relationships in a language (e.g. vowels in CVCs are short)..
• Phonological awareness — The understanding that speech is composed of sub-parts — sentences are comprised of words, words are comprised of syllables, syllables are comprised of onsets and rimes, and can be further broken down to phonemes.
• Segmentation — Breaking down a spoken word into word parts by inserting a pause between each part. Words can be segmented at the word level (in the case of compound words), at the syllable level, at the onset-rime level, and at the phoneme level.
• Repetition- Simple repeating of a word in order to emphasize.
• Rote Learning- Is a learning technique that focuses on memorization.
• Rhyming – A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs.
• Music and Movement- The use of rhythmic song and dance in education.