Phonics and Phonetics are both nouns based on the root phon- which means “sound.”
Phonics is a system for teaching people how to read languages that use alphabets, focusing on the sounds associated with each group of letters.
Phonetics is the science of describing linguistic sounds accurately, using special symbols and terminology. For example, in phonetics, the sound /p/ is described as an “unvoiced bilabial plosive.” Which isn't exactly helpful for those just learning to read, but crucial for those studying the many languages around the world.
Phonics and phonetics both match-up linguistic sounds with symbols. However, English phonics does not use true phonetics because English spelling is not rational (i.e., it is not consistent given that an English alphabetic letter can be symoblically tied to more than a single sound, wherease a true phonetic spelling system maintains a one-to-one correspondace between each symbol and its associated sound) . Additionally, phonetic science includes more than how to spell sounds; phoneticists also study acoustic phonetics, the waveforms of sounds, using spectrograms, and articulatory phonetics, describing exactly how the human body makes those sounds.
In sum, phonics is a teaching methodology; phonetics is a science.
What About Phonemic Awareness?
Phonetics and phonemic awareness are two more terms that are sometimes confused or used interchangeably, but they are different concepts. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes, while phonics, as explained above, is the understanding of a spelling system that allows you to read words.
More simply, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and remember the sounds of a word. It’s a process that helps a person learn how to read by breaking down sounds into their individual parts, and putting them back together to see how words are formed. Before a person can decode words by using the sound-spelling relationship (phonics), they must understand that words are made up of such individual sounds. Thus, understanding that a word is made up of a series of discrete sounds is essential for phonics instruction to be helpful.