Help me with phonemes

[MyDuvetDay]

Could someone please explain to me how to work out phonemes? My DD (Y3) doesn’t understand it and neither do I and neither does DH so we can’t help her with that aspect of her homework which is pretty embarrassing.

I gather that phonemes are about the different “groups” of sounds in a word. But they don’t seem to follow the same patterns as syllables and are not obvious to me at all.

For example, today’s homework indicated that the word “catcher” has 4 phonemes: C, A, TCH, ER.

But what I don’t get is why, in that word, C and A are distinct phonemes rather than being combined into a single phoneme: CA. Or why isn’t this word divided into the following 2 phonemes: CAT and CHER?

Despite having a degree in English, being a practising solicitor and a lifelong word puzzle enthusiast… phonemes escape me. Please help

Ah hah! So I'm not alone in this. Completely stumped me. I even googled and still didn't understand. Hopefully someone can explain it.. very embarrassing telling my 8 yr old I have no idea!

Twinkl gives a clear definition of phonemes and graphemes. There will be helpful resources on there too.
You could also look on Phonicsplay.co.uk for definitions and resources.

This is Wikipedia's definition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

Basically you can swap them for each other but you can't go any smaller.
So in English you can swap C for B, D etc. Si you'd have CA, BA DA
Or you can swap A for the E in Bed making CA, KE (same phoneme different spelling)
But you can't break TCH down any further (you can spell it CH but it's the same sound).

Syllabes are bigger than phonemes though occasionally they are just one vowel e.g. a-l-i-v alive has 4 phonemes and 2 syllables and the first syllable is just A.

Phonemes are 'set', a bit like graphemes (written sounds) - CA in catcher is separated into K and A because C isn't always pronounced CA. The same as SH in ship would be a separate phoneme to the I sound, because SH isn't always pronounced SHI.

I don't know if this is helping 😆

The 44 phonemes we use in English are

Consonant Phonemes: /b/, /d/, /f/, /g/, /h/, /j/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /p/, /r/, /s/, /t/, /v/, /w/, /y/, /z/, /ch/, /sh/, /th/ (voiced), /th/ (unvoiced), /zh/, /ng/.

Vowel Phonemes: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /ae/, /ee/, /ie/, /oe/, /ue/, /oo/, /oo/, /ou/, /oi/, /ar/, /er/, /or/, /air/, /eer/, /are/.

A phoneme is an individual sound, the grapheme is the written representation of that sound. Some phonemes are represented by just one letter, so c,a,t are all individual phonemes. Some phonemes need 2 letters to represent the sound, these are called digraphs, so sh,th, ai and some need three letters and are called trigraphs, eg igh, air,etc.
Words are made up of phonemes. So, the word train is made from t,r,ai,n. The word chair has two sounds, ch and air,
Children start by learning the individual phonemes, then some digraphs and trigraphs, and also some alternate ways of writing the same sound ( eg, /k/ can be written with c, k,ck and ch, depending on the word! - car, duck, kite, chemistry

Phonemes are the different individual sounds that make up a word and they are represented by graphemes, e.g the long ai sound is a phoneme that can be represented by various graphemes including ai, ay, a_e, a. Some phonemes are written using a single letter graphemes, some 2 letters (digraphs) and some 3 letters (trigraphs).

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound you can split a word down into and what a child would use through phonics to sound out a word to help them to read or spell it. So there could be multiple phonemes forming a syllable of a word, e.g. cat although only one syllable has 3 phonemes c-a-t. I haven’t looked for a while but Oxford owls website used to have a fantastic parents guide to support phonics which would explain this so much better than I have! But if you searched for a phonics phoneme guide or similar you would probably find a list of all of the different phonemes so that you know what you are looking for, from memory I think there are 44.

I hope that helps!

A phoneme is the smallest possible sound. You can’t break it down any further.
c-a-tch-er
t-ea-ch-er
d-augh-t-er
p-o-ss-i-b-le

Some phonemes are created by two or more or letters working together to create a new sound such as ch, sh, igh, ai, au,ay, ee, ough etc When written, sounds are known as graphemes. Where two letters make a sound = digraph , 3 letters = trigraph

Briefly, a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language.

C and A are phonemes as you can’t break them down further. CA isn’t a phoneme as you can split it into the C and A sounds.

CATCH and ER aren’t phonemes as they are syllables (groups of sound being a vowel with one or more consonants - if you try clapping out a word, then the syllables are the beats).

There’s a great website called alphabeticcodecharts.com which has charts with the different spellings for each phoneme. It can be quite confusing with the influence of different accents. CATCH is a tricky one for me as I feel as if the T really ought to be a separate sound, but the alphabetic code chart says that TCH is an alternate spelling for the CH sound.

This is probably more detail than OP needs but a phoneme is the smallest /meaningful/ unit of sound, so if you swap one phoneme for another it makes a different word. This is why understanding phonemes is important in decoding.

Phonemes don't care about subtler sound differences which don't alter the meaning. Interestingly phonemes vary from language to language. In some languages e.g. Mandarin, you can swap l and r without changing the meaning, so they're considered part of the same phoneme in Mandarin. But in English l vs r does make a difference so in English they are different phonemes. In English a native speaker will make a different sound for the t at the beginning of a word than at the end (there's a little puff of breath accompanying t at the start of a word). That difference doesn't matter in English so t and aspirated t are considered different ways of producing the same phoneme. But in Hindi those two sounds are different phonemes and getting the wrong one means you would be saying a different word!

This may seem complicated written out but phonemes are one of the first things babies learn about languages. There are fascinating experiments where babies demonstrate at about 11 months that they pay attention to differences that are meaningful in their mother tongue and tune out subtler differences. (Before that point they don't care).

/ch/ is a type of sound known as an affricate which are combinations of two types of sounds produced in the same part of the mouth (t and sh) but they are considered a single phoneme. It's not helpful that in English we tend to blur the two separate sounds together (compare "why choose" and "white shoes") but they do behave slightly differently to the separate sounds.

A syllable is composed of one or more phonemes but isn't about meaning, but more about stress and rhythm in speech. So it's not as useful for learners. (A syllable generally has at least one vowel, with every language having its own rules about what other sounds are permitted in a syllable.)

This is a video of all the phonemes and how to pronounce the ‘pure’ sounds 1 it makes a big difference when you are sounding out words.

Syllables do have an impact in the later stages of learning to decode though. If you think of a word like “enveloping” (probably not the best example but the only one I can think of this early) it is really long to decode in one go, but you can manage it in syllables. If you understand how the “ing” syllable works in verbs, then that also helps with decoding.

This is an issue I remember from when my DC learned to read, as I felt they needed more practice in decoding multisyllabic words than their reading scheme offered to be able to jump to “real” books.

I do think it’s important to acknowledge these issues, which can be subtle, because I’ve read so many posts over the years advising on reading difficulties along the lines of “phonics clearly isn’t working, it’s rubbish anyway especially for dyslexia, go back to Peter & Jane”, when really what’s needed is a thorough assessment of why each individual child can’t read (eg How much of the phonic code can they decode? Can they blend? Can they decode & blend multisyllabic words? Do they have another issue unrelated to phonics making reading difficult?) especially as many dyslexia programmes are explicitly phonics based & even Peter and Jane introduces phonics after the first few books.

Another issue that might perhaps explain the OPs confusion, is that the explanation posts on this thread have all been based on synthetic phonics. While this has been the recommended way of reading for 2 decades after the Rose Review looked at the research & recommended it, before that reading was a bit of a free-for-all with other methods used including analytic phonics (which seems to put more emphasis on syllables - that’s a very simple explanation as I’m not an expert on AP & I’m definitely not recommending it) so many parents’ experience of learning to read is inevitably going to be different to current practice.