Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing to beginners. To use phonics is to teach the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters (graphemes) or groups of letters or syllables of the written language. Phonics is also known as the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code.[2] It can be used with any writing system that is alphabetic, such as that of English, Russian, and most other languages. Phonics is also sometimes used as part of the process of teaching Chinese people (and foreign students) to read and write.

Phonics is taught using a variety of approaches, for example:

learning individual sounds and their corresponding letters (e.g., the word cat has three letters and three sounds c - a - t, whereas the word flower has six letters but four sounds: f - l - ow - er,

learning the sounds of letters or groups of letters, at the word level, such as similar sounds (e.g., cat, can, call), or rimes (e.g., hat, mat and sat have the same rime, "at"), or consonant blends (also consonant clusters in linguistics) (e.g., bl as in black and st as in last), or syllables (e.g., pen-cil and al-pha-bet), or

having students read books, play games and perform activities that contain the sounds they are learning.

Vowels in syllables. Every syllable of every word must have at least one vowel sound. ...

Short and long vowels. Vowels can make different sounds. ...

Silent e. ...

Consonant blends and digraphs. ...

Vowel digraphs. ...

R-controlled vowels. ...

The “schwa” sound. ...

Soft c and hard c, and soft g and hard g.