Phonics

Phonemes

Traditionally, the unit of sound used in phonics instruction has been the phoneme. The phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that makes a difference in the meaning of a word in a given language. For example, in English, if we drop the first /s/ in the spoken word smiles, wehave miles. All languages have phonemes, but the range of sound in any given phoneme differs from language to language. For example, /b/ and /v/ are distinct phonemes in English but variations of the same phoneme in Spanish.

Children who have not yet learned to read have trouble analyzing spoken words into phonemes. Adults who have learned to read can analyze spoken words into phonemes when the phonemes correspond with the spelling (as in cat) but have trouble when they do not (as in box). (The three letters of box represent four phonemes /b/, /o/, /k/, and /s/.)

Onsets and Rimes

In the 1970s, linguists discovered that spoken syllables in English consist of two natural parts: (1) any consonants before the vowel and (2) the vowel and any consonants that come after it. They named the first part the onset, and the second part the rime. In the spoken word smiles, for example, /sm/ is an onset and /īlz/ is a rime. Syllables may or may not have onsets but all syllables have rimes. For example, the word smiling has two syllables and, hence, two rimes but only one onset.

Although many languages have onsets and rimes, not all languages do. The psychological unit of the Spanish syllable is the syllable, not onsets and rimes.

Onsets and rimes may consist of one phoneme (as the /g/ and the /o/ in the word go) or more than one phoneme (as the /s/ and /m/ and the /ī/, /l/, and /z/ in the word smiles). In words composed entirely of one-phoneme onsets and rimes (as go), there are as many units of sound at the onset–rime level as there are phonemes. In all other words there are fewer units at the onset–rime level than phonemes. The spoken word smiles, for example, has two units at the onset–rime level (/sm/ and /īlz/) but five units at the phonemic level (/s/, /m/, /ī/, /l/, /z/). Most words have more than one phoneme in the onset or the rime in at least one syllable.

Onsets and rimes are so intuitive to native speakers of English that linguists call them the psychological units of the syllable. Long before linguists discovered onsets and rimes, poets and educators used them but called them by different names. Poets speak of alliteration and rhymes, and educators speak of word families. When there is more than one phoneme in an onset or a rime, English-speaking children who have not yet learned to read are able to analyze spoken words into their constituent onsets and rimes when they cannot analyze them into their constituent phonemes. For example, they can analyze the spoken word smiles into /sm/ and /īlz/ but not into /s/, /m/, /ī/, /l/, and /z/.

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