Synthetic Phonics terminology:

The following terms are used when teaching synthetic phonics. Those marked with a star can be used with the children from Reception onwards. Other words are just used when practitioners are discussing synthetic phonics/reading teachers’ notes etc.

phoneme*
The smallest unit of sound in a word.

grapheme*
Letter(s) which represent a phoneme/sound.

grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC):
The relationship between a phoneme and a grapheme. Children need to be able to write/find a grapheme in response to the phoneme and say the phoneme(s) when looking at a grapheme.

digraph*
Two letters which make one sound eg ‘sh’, ‘ai’, ‘ph’

trigraph*
Three letters which make one sound eg ‘igh’

split digraph*
(used to be known as magic ‘e’). 
A vowel digraph (eg ‘ie’) which is split up by another letter eg 'time’,make’.

short vowel*
A vowel sound which is short - there are 5 of them: /a/ (as in cat), /e/ (as in bed), /i/ (as in pin), /o/ (as in hot), /u/ (as in hut).

long vowel*
A vowel sound which is long - there are 5 of them: /ai/ (as in make, rain, day), /ee/ (as in these, me, tree), /igh/ (as in tie, night, my), /oa/ (as in coat, low, go), /ue/ (as in moon, tune, unit).

blend/cluster
Two (or three) letters making two (or three) sounds eg lost, sprite.

blending*
Reading the letters in a written word eg b-a-t, and merging them to pronounce the word (‘bat’).  This skill is needed for reading.

segmenting*   
Identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word (eg b-a-t) and writing
down or moving letters for each sound to form the word (‘bat’). This skill
is needed for spelling.