Synthetic Phonics programmes now talk of ‘adjacent consonants’. What are adjacent consonants? Why is it that the letters ‘bl’ in the word ‘black’ are adjacent consonants while the letters ‘ck’ are not?
Adjacent consonants are two or more consonants that appear next to one another within a word, and they each represent a different sound. Take the word ‘stop’, for example. The ‘s’ and ‘t’ are adjacent consonants not only because they appear next to one another but also because they spell two different sounds: /s/ and /t/.
Adjacent consonants can appear at the beginning of a word (e.g. ‘grab’), at the end of a word (e.g. ‘bend’) or at both ends of a word (e.g. ‘print’). There can be three adjacent consonants in a word, like in the word ‘scrap’. These are also called ‘consonant strings’.
When two or more consonants spell just one sound, such as the letters ‘s’ and ‘h’ together spelling the sound /sh/, they are called a digraph. That is why the letters ‘ck’ in the word ‘black’ are not adjacent consonants but a digraph: two letters that spell the sound /k/.
In the past, adjacent consonants were called ‘blends’. However, now that we use the verb ‘to blend’ (meaning ‘to push sounds together into a word’), using the noun ‘blend’ may confuse.
Phonic Books publishes reading books that help pupils to practise reading words with adjacent consonants. To see the range, visit their shop here.