Synthetic phonics, also known as blended phonics or inductive phonics, is a method of teaching English reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words. Overview Synthetic phonics refers to a family of programs which aim to teach reading and writing through the following methods: Teaching students the correspondence between written letters (graphemes) and speech sounds (phonemes). For example, the words me and pony have the same sound at the end, but use different letters. Teaching students to read words by blending: identifying the graphemes (letters) in the word, recalling the corresponding phonemes (sounds), and saying the phonemes together to form the sound of the whole word. Teaching students to write words by segmenting: identifying the phonemes of the word, recalling the corresponding graphemes, then writing the graphemes together to form the written word. Synthetic phonics programs have some or all of the following characteristics: Teaching grapheme-phoneme (letters-sound) correspondence out of alphabetic order, following an order determined by perceived complexity (going from easiest to hardest to learn). Teaching the reading and writing of words in order of increasing irregularity, in other words teaching words which follow typical grapheme-phoneme correspondence first (e.g. ape and cat), and teaching words with idiosyncratic or unusual grapheme-phoneme correspondence later (e.g. eight and duck). Synthetic phonics programs do not have the following characteristics: Encouraging students to guess the meaning of words from contextual clues (see whole language method). Encouraging students to memorise the shape of words, to recall them by sight (see Look say method). Teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondence on a "when needed" basis or as applied to particular groups of words, when these words arise in other forms of reading instruction (see embedded phonics in Whole language). Methodology Synthetic phonics teaches the phonemes (sounds) associated with the graphemes (letters) at the rate of about six sounds per week. The sounds are taught in isolation then blended together (i.e. synthesised), all-through-the-word. For example, learners might be taught a short vowel sound (e.g. a as in cat) in addition to some consonant sounds (e.g. s, t, p). Then the learners are taught words with these sounds (e.g. sat, pat, tap, at). They are taught to pronounce each phoneme in a word, then to blend the phonemes together to form the word (e.g. s - a - t; "sat"). Sounds are taught in all positions