Sound-Letter Correspondence: A Quick Introduction

We know students need to learn the names of the letters of the alphabet AND the sounds that those letters represent. While many of us tend to teach these skills in isolation, there’s some evidence that teaching letter names in conjunction with letter sounds, articulation, and letter formation can help map the information in the brain. 

We will refer to this process of teaching letter names and sounds simultaneously as sound-letter correspondence. When we teach the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes), we are teaching students the code to unlock words.

When students are just learning sound letter correspondence, we use key words and illustrations to support their learning. 

To be skilled with sound-letter correspondence, students need to know that: 

1. Sounds (phonemes) are the smallest parts of spoken language.

2. We use letters or combinations of letters to represent sounds in writing. For example, the letters ‘s’, ‘h’, ‘i’, and ‘p’ represent the sounds of the word ship. And, the spoken word ship has three sounds: /sh/, /ĭ/, and /p/ and four letters 's', 'h', 'i', and 'p'. 

3. Letters and letter combinations used to represent sounds in words are called graphemes. For example, the first two letters of the word ship, ‘s’ and ‘h’, are a digraph representing the single /sh/ sound at the beginning of the word.

4. And, the same sounds can be spelled by more than one grapheme. For example, the /f/ sound is NOT always and only represented by the letter ‘f’; ‘ph’ in phone represents the /f/ sound, too! 

Unpack short vowels on the next page!