What is Phonic knowledge?

Phonic knowledge refers to the relationship between speech sounds (phonemes) and their letter symbols (graphemes). The Standard Australian English alphabetic code consists of 44 unique phonemes. These phonemes are represented by 26 letters of the alphabet, either individually or in combination.

Understanding and using the alphabetic code is essential for fluent and meaningful reading and writing in English (NESA 2022). For children to develop the code-breaking skills required for reading, teachers must provide systematic, direct and explicit phonics instruction (Rowe 2005).

The most explicit and systematic method of phonics instruction is Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP). It is highly effective in whole-class instruction and intervention settings (Buckingham and Wheldall 2023).

Teaching Phonic knowledge

Phonic knowledge is a focus area within the Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 NSW English K–10 Syllabus. It is also embedded within Reading fluency and Spelling across all stages from K–6.

According to Buckingham and Wheldall (2023), the critical components of synthetic phonics includes explicitly teaching:

• grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in a structured and cumulative sequence that progresses from the simple to complex (or extended) phonics code
• the skill of blending phonemes
• the skills of segmenting words into phonemes to spell
• that blending and segmenting are reciprocal processes.

Students are provided with opportunities to practise and consolidate word reading skills in decodable texts that are closely aligned to the phonics sequence being used.

Effective phonics instruction should lead to the development of reading fluency as this is considered the bridge from phonics to reading comprehension (Kim et al. 2014).

There are numerous links between the focus areas in English. The development of knowledge and skills in these areas is often interconnected and is most effectively addressed in parallel.

In the context of the NSW English K–10 Syllabus, 'in parallel' means:

• teaching multiple focus areas concurrently
• delivering related content in a sequence
• applying knowledge, understanding, and skills through interconnected focus areas (NESA 2022).

Phonic knowledge is often taught in parallel with Phonological awareness, Spelling, Reading comprehension and Handwriting. We have created an illustration of practice to demonstrate explicit teaching of phonics.