Chapter 1
Phonological and Phonemic Awareness and Emergent Literacy
Course: Elementary Education Multiple Subjects 7001
Subject: Elementary Education Teaching Reading Subtest 7002
Chapter: Phonics And Decoding
Understanding how to teach common phonics patterns is a foundational component of effective reading instruction in the primary grades. These patterns include consistent and predictable relationships between letters and sounds that enable students to decode and encode words accurately. Instruction should be intentional, explicit, multisensory, and sequenced in a way that supports developmental reading stages. The goal is to give students the tools to decode unfamiliar words, generalize patterns across contexts, and gradually build automaticity.
Teachers must ensure that phonics instruction includes not only the introduction of individual phoneme-grapheme correspondences, but also instruction in more complex orthographic patterns such as digraphs, blends, diphthongs, schwa sounds, syllable types, and word families.
1. Consonant Digraphs
Consonant digraphs are letter combinations made up of two consonants that represent a single phoneme, meaning one unified sound. The individual letters in a digraph do not retain their original sounds. For instance, in the digraph "sh," neither the /s/ nor the /h/ is heard separately—instead, they create the new sound /ʃ/ as in “ship.”