Rod - further discussion on former thread below (nt)

Hi victoria,

I found your reply. Glad to see it was just that I was misunderstanding what you were saying.

You say in that last message something about 44 to 46 sounds if I recall. Can I run the ones I teach past you and see what you would add. Mine come to 43 plus the schwa, which I really try to avoid in most words, preferring to have them pronounce with perfect pronunciation (because I think it helps their spelling.)

Anyway, here’re the 43 sounds (with examples where it clarifies)…

24 consonants: b,k,d,f,g,h,j,l,m,n,p,r,s,t,v,w,z, and sh, ch, th(thick), the (that), zh (vision), hw (when) and ng (song)

19 vowels: a, e, i, o, u (short vowels), ae, ee, ie, oe, ue (long vowels) oo (moon), oul (wood, could), oy, ow (cow), aw, er, ar (car), or(for) and err (cherry, very, arrow, etc.)

This gives me 43 plus the schwa, or 44. I treat the consonant y as an /ee/ sound, but I guess I would count that as another sound if I were trying to teach first graders, so 44 plus the schwa. Any thoughts?. By the way, I do understand what you are saying when you say that some of these are combinations of more basic sounds, but I’m talking from an instructional level here, not a linguistic level…okay?….Rod

OK, your list looks pretty good.

Schwa is definitely the most common sound in normal speech. Yes, absolutely, a hyper-correct pronunciation helps learn spelling, but in reading aloud it’s important to use natural speech stress. Also when a kid wants to learn to spell a word from oral vocabulary, he has to know that the spoken schwa sound can be a variety of written vowels.

The one you call oul as in would is also sometimes u as in put, push.

Yes, do add consonantal y. That would take you to 45.

However, the err as in cherry is simply short e plus r, and usually is not treated separately, so that takes you back to 44.

The forty-fifth sound, which is definitely in my dialect, is ou as in out and house — it is distinctly different from ow as in cow. Technically, the cow sound is a diphthong ah (as in awful) sliding to oo, and the out sound is short e (as in end) sliding to oo.

Pedagogically, it makes sense to also teach qu = kw (otherwise, there is no reasonable sound for q) and that makes 46.

By the way, I have recommended this before: charts from a company called Phonovisual, on the web I believe at Phonovisual.com
These consonant and vowel charts are *excellent* reference materials. All the phonemes (except zh) are organized in the pattern of how they are formed in the mouth. The first row is b, p, m, which are all bilabials (formed with two lips together). The second row is wh, w, formed with a small lip o. The third row is f, v, labiodentals (teeth on lip). And so on. Then, the first column is unvoiced (p, wh, f, etc.), the second column is voiced (b, w, v, etc), the third column is nasal continuants (m, n, ng) and the fourth and last column is the sounds that are hard to classify (qu, y, r, l, x). The vowel chart goes from front of mouth (ae, a) to back of mouth (ue, u), and from stressed “long” vowels to unstressed to diphthongs. Each sound is illustrated by a key word.
Large classroom sizes are expensive but definitely worth having on the wall. Small individual charts are available very inexpensively in packets.

I don’t often use the workbooks from this company, which are not terribly exciting and I know some that are more interesting, but I do recommend the charts.

Hi victoria,

Thanks for the response. I’ve a few questions and comments.

First, you’re correct that we don’t have the sound that you refer to in “out” although I believe we tend to hear your “out” as /oo/t/. I realize you don’t say it that way, but that’s how we reproduce it. We pronounce “cow” and “out” with approximately identical vowel sounds and consider them one sound.

Second, the reason I feel comfortable with an /err/ sound is that in our dialect the words “marry,” “merry” and “Mary” all sound identical and rhyme with “very.” The vowel sound (including the /r/) sounds exactly like the word “air” in all four words (again, in Midwest dialect.)

Third, while I see why you teach “qu” as an entity, would you not agree that it introduces no new sounds. It is just a digraph that is usually pronounced with the two familiar sounds /k/+/w/.

And, while we’re on that tack, do you teach the ending “le” as two sounds /u/+/l/ (rhyming with “pull”) where “u” represents what I was calling the /oul/ sound in the previous post?…just curious. Or do you teach it as simply the /l/ sound?

Bet this is boring everyone to tears….but thanks for your input….Rod

My dialect — Canadian of Scottish background — is 99% similar to General American; that slight difference of the ou sound is one of the very few differences.

And no, maybe you *think* you are hearing “oo” but when people try to reproduce this they just don’t get it; it’s a diphthong, short e plus oo. Sort of like the Chinese students who can’t tell l from n (no kidding) or s from sh; they may *think* they’re reproducing what they hear, but we find “sirt” and “seven eight line” are just wrong.

We also pronounce Mary, mary, and merry identically, and yes, the syllable still sounds like “air”. And that is just short e plus r — try it. This is just two well-known sounds, and you have the two letters to represent them, which is why I don’t find a need to make a separate point of it.

On the other hand, if you don’t teach qu = kw, what sound do you assign to q? And how do you explain the u?? I have a lot of trouble with students who have been told q is k, and then they try to sound out the u, so you get kue-een or kuh-een instead of queen. In this case yes, the phonemes are well known, but the spelling pattern does need to be learned as an entity.

le ending as in candle and bottle is just schwa plus l — another reason to get used to saying the schwa.

If people find this boring, nobody is forcing them to read through it all!

And they are at the wrong board…many of us find it FASCINATING…keep it up!

Hi victoria,

We’re into that stage where it would be a lot easier to talk it over than write about it but….

1) On your “out” - I think we actually “hear” an /oo/ sound when you say “out” because we don’t use your “ou” (as in “out”) sound here. Thus, we categorize it mentally as the closest sound we do use, and repeat it as “oot.” When we say it, we know it doesn’t sound like you’re “out” but it’s the best we can do with our inventory of learned speech sounds……agreed?

2) On /air/ - This sound is one that causes problems because you can get there so many different ways, and some of those ways bear no resemblence to /e/+/r/. In fact, spellings that look like /e/+/r/ (merry, very) and like /a/+/r/ (arrow, carrot) and like /ae/+/r/ (pair, share) all have identical sounding /air/’s in them. Plus you have “there” and “where” so, as I said, I just tell them they all have /air/ sounds in them. This isn’t a big issue in any case, but that’s why I do it. Plus it’s very easy to work into the curriculum I use. I’m not sure many would agree with me here, but it’s what I do, that is, I acknowledge an /air/ sound.
In fact, the curriculum I use actually fails to acknowledge both /ar/ and /or/ (both segmented as two sounds) and also /hw/ treated as either /h/ or /w/,) /the/ in “then,” (just ignored) /ng/ in “ink” (treated as /n/) and /aw/ in “claw” (treated as /o/ in “hot” As designed it was a little too streamlined for me, so I’ve added those sounds back into it.

3) On “qu” - I do teach that “qu” is pronounced /k/w/. My point was that the pronunciation of “qu” introduces no new sounds. We already had counted both /k/ and /w/ in the original count. I agree with you in not assigning the /k/ to “q” and the /w/ to “u,” but /kw/ is still two already-counted sounds, so it’s not really a new sound….correct?

4) On “le” - Question: Isn’t the vowel sound in “pull” the same as the vowel sound in “push?” Not a schwa, but what I call the /oul/ sound in “could?” And, if so, isn’t the “ple” in “purple” pronounced “pull,” so wouldn’t it too be considered to have the same vowel sound as in “push” rather than being considered a schwa, which is more of an /u/ sound, is it not?

Okay, that’s it for tonight….looking forward to your reply…Rod

…

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I love analyzing the sounds and dialects, and it really came in handy in choir — where we’re taught to somehow keep a similar vowel *sound* but change how we’re holding our mouths, among other things.
But I do pause periodically and reflect that no, it is *not* necessary to know all this to learn to read and speak — and it’s our struggling students who are the least likely to be able to discern these distinctions.

And why *don’t* we have more words with blends with w ? Is it because when our speech was developing too many people confused r blends and w blends so twied would be confused with tried?

Be careful — avoid falling into the “phonics made difficult” trap. Yes, there are complexities and side paths, but basic phonics will take you a long, long way. Learn and teach regularities first and the odd studff later.

You’re probably right. There is a whole sub-area called phonotactics which describes which sounds a particular language will put in series and which sounds not. English allows fairly long consonant groupings — I have a heck of a time teaching people in ESL to say “wants” and “didn’t” for example — more of these in English than in most other languages; but some Eastern European languages allow even more. An interesting question but the “why” goes back in history.

Let’s see:

Well, the ou sound isn’t oo, and yes, you’re substituting a close but not identical sound. This is maddening to the second-language teacher. Very hard to get people to *hear* a sound that they won’t accept.

Yes, the qu sound is just a convenience to assign a sound to q.

The “air” sound is indeed a problem. I don’t know, most of the time by the time I get kids to the point that they’re reading all those words, they are getting pretty good at figuring things out anyway; I teach them to try variant vowel sounds if the simplest doesn’t work. So I’ve never had to worry much about it.

No, the u in “pull” is stressed, either short u as in cup or short oo as in book. The ple in purple is unstressed, a schwa. There is a distinction in hearing between a normal spoken “purple” and “purr - pull”. A small distinction, but it’s there. I’m trying to remember a minimal pair that makes this distinction; nothing comes to mind right away but there are some.