Phonics is a method for teaching people how to read and write an alphabetic language (such as English, Arabic or Russian). It is done by demonstrating the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters or groups of letters (graphemes) or syllables of the written language. In English, this is also known as the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code.

While the principles of phonics generally apply regardless of the language or region, the examples in this article are from General American English pronunciation. For more about phonics as it applies to British English, see Synthetic phonics.

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, (in IPA: , , ), whereas the word flower has six letters but four sounds: f - l - ow - er, (IPA , , , ), or
• 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.