How Does it Work?

LEM Phonics gives learners the skills to confidently break a word into its parts and either decode them (for reading) or encode them (for Spelling). Rather than learning thousands of unique words, they learn the component parts of these words and the rules that govern them. We have consistently found that when children are taught using the LEM Phonics method teachers are delighted at the significant improvement in all aspects of literacy.

The Phonograms

Each sound in the English language can represented by a single letter (b, t) or multiple letters (ee, igh). These written units of sound are called phonograms. The 42 sounds of the English language are represented by 75 phonograms. Memorising the phonograms and their sounds is the first skill students learn.

Although ‘d’, ‘o’, ‘g’ sounds like dog, ‘f’, ‘i’, ‘s’, ‘h’ does not sound like fish when sounded as individual letters. Children learn the combined letter graphemes (multiple phonograms) as well as learning the different sounds the phonograms can represent (for example, c can sound like ‘k’ in cat or ‘s’ in city).

The Rules

In order to read a word, one needs to answer the question ‘Which sound is that particular phonogram saying?’ Does the c in city sound like ‘k’ or ‘s’?

In order to spell a word, the question becomes ‘Which phonogram should I use to say that particular sound?’ Should the ‘ow’ sound in down be spelled with ow

(down) or ou (doun)?

One of the keys to the success of LEM Phonics is the set of rules, which answer these two questions for the phonograms and sounds. Our examples above can be

solved by knowing these rules:
c says ‘s’ when followed by e, i or y
we use the phonogram ow to say the sound ‘ow’ before n alone.

LEM Phonics also uses rules for prefixes and suffixes.