3 Science of Reading Terms: Phonemes, Graphemes, and Morphemes

When you first dive into the Science of Reading, there are a lot of terms to know. As you dive into your SoR journey, it can be overwhelming to remember all the terms. It’s important to be able to differentiate between phonemes, graphemes, and morphemes to aide in your teaching. Let’s look at these three terms.

Phonemes

A phoneme is a single speech sound. For example, page has 3 phonemes – /p/ /a/ /j/. It’s the smallest unit of spoken sound and it’s what helps us distinguish one word from another. This is an important building block to learn phonics because phonics is understanding the relationship between sounds and written language. You can read more about phonics in this blog post.

Being able to hear and manipulate sounds is an important skill for little learners to develop before they are taught how to read. Phonemic awareness is the ability to manipulate sounds heard in spoken words. You can read more about phonemic awareness in this blog post. As students learn the different sounds, they can begin to listen for specific sounds within words and practice phonemic isolation.

There are 44 phonemes in the English language. In most cases, a single letter represents a phoneme, like c says /k/. However, there are some instances (like digraphs) where two letters represent a single phoneme, like th says /th/ or a single letter represents two phonemes, like x says /k/ /s/. A single phoneme can also be represented in a variety of ways. For example, the sound /n/ can be spelled n, kn, gn, etc.

Morphemes

A morpheme is a single meaning. For example, page has more than one meaning: a page in a book or to message someone. When students hear ‘morpheme,’ they can think ‘meaning.’ A morpheme cannot be further divided. A base word is a morpheme but a prefix or suffix can be a morpheme as well. The word ‘bags’ is made up of two morphemes: ‘bag’ meaning something used to carry items and ‘-s’ meaning more than one.

Multisyllabic words are made up of multiple morphemes. The word ‘prehistoric’ is made up of three morphemes: ‘pre-‘ meaning before, ‘hist’ from the Latin ‘historia’ meaning ‘past events or story,’ and ‘-ic’ meaning relating to or characteristic of.

It’s important that students understand morphology because it will help them gain better comprehension when they come across unfamiliar multisyllabic words. Adding or removing morphemes changes the meaning of any given word. It can also alter the pronunciation of the word.

For example, they know the meaning of the root word ‘art,’ and the word ‘artist,’ so when they encounter the word ‘artistic’ they can infer that its meaning is something created by a person who has talent or skill in the arts. Understanding morphemes helps students build their vocabulary.

Graphemes

A grapheme is a single sound spelling. For example, page has 3 graphemes – p, a, ge. A grapheme is the smallest unit of written language regardless of whether it has meaning or corresponds to a phoneme. They are the symbols we use to read and write.

As mentioned above, one phoneme can be represented by more than one grapheme. The /f/ sound can be represented by graphemes f, ph, ff, gh, or lf. To make things even more complicated for our little readers, one grapheme can also represent many phonemes. The letter y can represent the /y/ sound but also long i, short i, long e.

Graphemes are an important part of learning to read because they provide a visual representation of the sounds that make up words. There are approximately 250 graphemes in the English language.

Why is this important?

Understanding these terms is important for any reading teacher. All words have 3 parts: sounds (phonemes), spelling (graphemes), and meaning (morphemes). Students need to be able to identify the phonemes in a word when they hear it. They can then connect those sounds to their corresponding grapheme (letter). This is decoding text. Morphemes are probably the most neglected literacy term. When students are decoding text, they also must understand what they are reading. They’re not reading just to read the words, they’re reading to understand the text. The meaning of a word is its morpheme.

These three terms are interconnected, but they don’t always line up perfectly. We must help our students put all these concepts together to comprehend what they read.

Want to read more about the Science of Reading? Check out these blog posts!