Didn’t hear back from you so I don’t know if you saw it, so I’m re-posting.
We were discussing sounds for w, w as a vowel, and diphthongs. The program your students were confused by was *pedagogically* totally inappropriate — this material makes sense to adult foreign language learners, linguistics students, and the rare gifted child, *not* to the other 99.9% of reading learners — but linguistically speaking it;s not as far off the mark as you might think.
Further linguistiucally speaking, that is exactly what a diphthong is — a quick slide from one vowel sound to another.
oy is a quick slide from oh to ee
In standard American English, ay and ie are also diphthongs, ay being a quick slide from eh to ee, and ie being a quick slide from ah to ee (ah as in father, water)
ow in cow is a quick slide from ah to oo
If you have a Scottish or Scottish-Canadian background, you also distinguish a different diphthong, ou in house being a quick slide from eh to oo
Try these in your mouth and see how they work — it’s fun.
If you are teaching a second-language learner, like my Chinese students, it is important to know these and teach them. It would also be a help working with a hearing-disabled student or one with a speech problem.
For the average reading learner, it is NOT a good idea to teach all this detail — the kid has only to form the sounds in his mouth and relate the sound to the appropriate visual symbol. If the child speaks English as a native or near-native speaker, he can already form and distinguish all these sounds and it is a very bad idea to add a layer of confusion teaching linguistics at the same time. Everything in its own season.
Re: Rod -- further linguistically speaking
Yes, wh is an unvoiced w. However this is a problem to teach as a number if US dialects don’t admit this sound, and many texts teach kids not to differentiate.
I have some sonderful, wonderful charts put out by Phonovisual, available at phonovisual.com. They have all the consonants on one page and all the vowels on the other. The sounds are arranged in order of formation, the first row being bilabials p, b, m, the second row being rounded lips wh, w, and so on; the first column being unvoiced p, wh, f, etc. and the second column voiced b, w, v, and the third column cnasal continuants m, n, ng; the last column is the hard to classify sounds qu, x, r, y. There are large wall charts, expensive but worth it in class, and small students charts which at one point I laminated and glued to the desks. If you have students who need work on PA, these charts are a very good investment. I don’t use the PV workbooks much as I have others that cover the same material more interestingly, but the material and plan are solid.
I teach the two th sounds together as they are so similar; most kids can separate them easily in speech. I do make it clear that there are two sounds, voiced and unvoiced.
As far as the when-then, where-there, for-of-from, the-a confusion, every time I see this it reinforces my campaign against so-called “sight” words. These are very necessary connecting words in English and you can hardly read a page of real language without running into them repeatedly. So a number of otherwise good reading programs start off by teaching kids to try to memorize these by sight, especially since they haven’t taught kids digraphs yet. Worse, many people tell kids falsely that these are “unphonetic” words — not true at all; except for “of, six are either perfectly phonetically regular and five have one slightly variant vowel. Besides which there are NO totally “unphonetic” words in English. (The very worst are “one” and “once”; but even there the n and ce are regular, the “uh” sound for o is common, and the only really bizarre thing is the initial “w” sound coming from nowhere — NOT totally “unphinetic by a long shot.) So anyway the kid is trying to read with two mutually contradictory sets of rules — if you see this word you are supposed to have memorized it by sight, but if you see this word you are supposed to sound it out. And if he sees a word he doesn’t know right off, how is he supposed to know which set of rules to use, I ask you? So kids take a guess based on the general visual form of the word and gets it right half the time, just enough to reinforce the guessing behaviour. I work on this by making the kid stop and identify the beginning letter digraph each and every time he slips. This takes months and months of unteaching; far better to teach use of phonetic clues from Day 1.
Re: Rod -- further linguistically speaking
Hi victoria,
Interesting…I do much the same as far as /th/the/ and I’m with you 100 percent on the sight words. And thanks for clearing up the /hw//w/ relationship…I’ve been wondering about that one for a while now.
Are there any other English words besides “one” and “once” that are missing letters to represent a sound (other than deriviatives of one)?
Now, what do you think of this? I don’t bother teaching a consonant sound for the letter “y” at the beginning of a word. Instead, I wait until I hit the /ee/ sound and the “y” spelling of /ee/ in a word like “happy” and then point out that the “y” at the beginning of a word like “yard” is really an /ee/ sound. Then I have them say /ee/../ar/../d/ and then blend it fast…and they get /ee/ar/d/ which sounds like “yard.” Seems to work, but how do you handle it? By the way, the main reason I do this is to get rid of the sloppy “yuh” that most kids want to say.
Rod
Re: Rod -- further linguistically speaking
I read with interest yourdialogue with Victoria. I am a bilingual teacher who teaches 1st grade in Spanish. My class includes 6 IEP students and a whole range of ability levels. Most programs in spanish teach the /y/ sound as yuh and being equal to the /ll/, which is really /zhe/. I have changed the way I teach the letter “y” because of the high-frequency of the word “y” as in “tu y yo”. It is clearly an /ee/ sound, which works as a dipthong when combined with a vowel. Catch up in English—it works the same way!
Re: Rod -- further linguistically speaking
There are several words that have some sound inserted in Standard English, and many more in some dialects. A lot of people say “sumpthing” for “something”. Many people insert an “r” in some words; my mother’s home dialect had “worsh” for “wash” for example. One that I dislike and try to get kids to stop using is “athalete” for “athlete”. However most of these sounds are not absolutely necessary to the pronunciation of the word. I can’t right off the top of my head think of any *necessary* insertions except one and once, although there may be some more.
One thing that comes up frequently in my ESL classes: when a verb ends in ay or ee or ie sounds, and you add ing, you have to add a “y” sound to separate the two syllables distinctly; the ing ending becomes a ying ending. Examples are skiing, lying, playing. This is a real problem for my Chinese students (among fifty other pronunciation problems …); they tend to say sking, ling, plaing, and it is really hard to understand, and harder still to get them to change.
As far as y, no, I teach it with all the other consonants. When you teach b and d and g and so on, all the stops, you have to have at least a little puff of air and a little “uh” sound, so you get buh and duh and guh. I get around this, if necessary, by doing the “motorboat” thing, saying “b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-” very fast so the b sound is stressed and the uh is minimized; same with y
I don’t have so much trouble with my Chinese students with y, but I’m having a heck of a time with v and w, (as well as n, l, r, th, and s-sh). For some reason the teachers in China have them say “w” for v, as in German (but these are not German teachers, but Chinese!) and “oo” for w. So Vancouver — a city with many Chinese, and a frequent topic in conversation — comes out as “wah-coo-wah” Ouch. And woman comes out as “oo-ma” Ouch again. These are people with university degrees and doctorates who have studied English for ten years and more — and they pronounce worse than a preschooler, with ten years of bad habits ingrained. I get them to make the right sound over and over again, and then in the next sentence they go right back. I am tearing my hair out over them, and any further suggestions would be welcome — how do you beat ten years of habit?
Thanks, Victoria. I hadn’t seen your reply…I only go back a few pages when I check in here and the board’s been active lately.
I agree with you about not getting into the gory detail of something the kid already implicitly knows, i.e., the way the sounds are made.
Let me ask your opinion on the following. I teach that “wh” represents a specific sound, /hw/, distinct from /h/ and /w/, and I also teach that there is a difference in the /th/ sound in “think” and the /the/ sound in “then.” I do this because I feel that the ignorance of this information is possibly the reason poor readers are always mixing up “when” and “where” with “then” and “there,” etc. Any thoughts? What do you do? And by the way, is /hw/ an unvoiced /w/? It sounds like (feels like) it to me……Rod