Literacy News

Words, letters, syllables, phonemes, graphs . . .

To support our implementation of the SMART Spelling Approach, the Literacy Curriculum team would like to share some theory about the language associated with spelling. 

Language is naturally acquired from birth, but written language needs to be taught. We teach students how to spell through letters, syllables, phonemes and graphs. 

Let’s have a look at the word dinosaur;

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Letters are the symbols of the alphabet. There are 26 letters: a, b, c, d, e . . .

There are 8 letters in the word dinosaur.

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Syllables are the units of pronunciation, or the 'beats' of a word.

Dinosaur has three syllables: di / no / saur

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Phonemes are the sounds of speech. In Australian English there are 44 sounds, made up of 20 vowels and 24 consonants.

Dinosaur has 6 phonemes.

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Graphs are the ways that phonemes are represented in words. Graphs are made up of a combination of letters.

The phonemes in dinosaur can be represented as follows (let's sound them out):

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d / i / n / o / s / aur

A graph is one letter that represents a sound.

A digraph is two letters that represent a sound.

A trigraph is three letters that represent a sound.

A quadgraph (that's right!) is four letters that represent a sound, e.g. / ough / in rough.