Sounds and letters have inevitably been confused because, unless we are familiar with an international pronunciation system, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, we cannot represent a sound in writing without reference to a word that we pronounce in the same way. If your first language is Welsh or Spanish, you might even read ch as the non-English phoneme in bach or hecho Many of us have muddled along with a version of phonics and many of our pupils bypassed understanding of this aspect of reading as quickly as possible, using visual, structural and semantic cueing strategies. The picture chart representing the 44 phonemes of English with key words and pictures for 120 common spelling choices has been described by one teacher as the periodic table of the English language . Each chart has 44 phoneme-boxes, one box for each phoneme, which contain the main graphemes for the phoneme. For example, the phoneme at the start of jam may be spelled j, g, ge, dge, as in such basic words as jam, giant, cage and bridge.
Teachers use the charts to teach children or adults to read, write, speak and listen in English.
Through using the act of handwriting to trace over the graphemes, they are taught that, at Word Level, reading involves changing graphemes to phonemes and spelling involves changing phonemes to graphemes. If the children or adults create a Wrong Phoneme Word when reading or a Wrong Grapheme Word when spelling, the teachers, children or adults use the charts to see if the mistake was a big or little mistake. Instead of the English language being impossible , it is a rich topic for discussion, whatever the language skills and age of the learner. Some 100 teachers have been trained in the methodology and gained certification. The corner-stone is not the whole house and this article takes it for granted that phonics instruction is embedded in a total, rich reading programme but that s another article.