Consonants are phonemes made by constricting the vocal channel enough to cause friction. Correspondences are learned links between graphemes and phonemes, so that the grapheme triggers the phoneme when reading a word. Decodable texts are texts in which most of the words can be decoded using correspondences children have learned to date in their phonics program. Decoding means using the spelling of a word to reconstruct its pronunciation. Early decoding involves sounding out and blending, but later decoding takes only a fast and silent spelling analysis.
Digraphs are graphemes written with more than one letter.
Explicit phonics describes a lesson in which the teacher pronounces phonemes to model how to sound out and blend. Phoneme awareness is knowledge of phoneme identities, i.e., recognizing individual phonemes in word contexts. Phonological awareness is the ability to tune into speech sounds apart from meaning. Segmentation means breaking down a word into word parts. Sight words are words a reader recognizes instantly.