This is a method of teaching young children to read and spell in English as they are taught to link an individual letter or letter combination with its appropriate sound and then blend the individual sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of word-for example, pronouncing each phoneme in champ /ch/-/a/-/m/-/p/ and then blending those phonemes to produce the word. Simply put, phonics is the method of teaching by co-relating phoneme (sound) with its grapheme (letter(s)) in a written language.

A systematic approach to teaching synthetic phonics means teachers take a planned thorough approach, teaching children the simplest sounds first and progressing all the way through to the most complex combinations of letters.

Using a systematic synthetic phonics approach, almost all children quickly become confident and independent readers. They soon move away from the mechanics of identifying and blending letter sounds (or ‘decoding’ words) and start reading fluently even when they come across words they have never heard or seen before. Once the process of reading becomes automatic, fluent and easy, they can devote all their attention to understanding the meaning of what they have read.