Phonics #2

Things I want to remember:

·         The Roman alphabet had only 26 letters to represent apprx. 44 English sounds.  English made up for this by combining letters to make the missing sounds.

·         Phonemic Awareness; The understanding that words consist of sounds and the ability to act on this understanding

·         The grapheme is the written representation of the phoneme. As the phoneme is the unit in the sound system, the grapheme is the unit in the written code.

·         The three types of cues used to identify unfamiliar words are graphophonic cues, which consist of letter to sound relationships, syntactic cues, which consist of grammatical relationships, and semantic cues, which consist of meaningful relationships.

After reading the first chapter of the “Phonics and Structural Analysis for the Teacher of Reading”, I felt like my knowledge of phonics had greatly increased.  I did find the book a little hard to follow; due to the way it is written.  The chapter spoke of how there are 26 letters in the English language, but 44 phonemes.  With so many sounds and so few letters, Americans need to get creative.  Some of these creative graphemes are /th/ and /ch/.  This chapter also looked like there is a science to reading, instead of just “knowing” the words.  I have always been more of a “sound it out” reader; hopefully, this book will help me with my phonics.