Teaching Phonics - PBworksteachingpronunciation.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/51126378/Phonics... · • In alphabetic writing systems, each symbol represents ... * A buzzword is a technical

Teaching Phonics

Marla YoshidaUniversity of California Irvine Extension

International ProgramsTeaching English as a Foreign Language Certificate Program

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Tuesday, February 21, 12

What is phonics?• Phonics is the study of the relationship between

written letters and spoken sounds.

• It also describes a way of teaching people to read by emphasizing regular patterns in the relationship between letters and sounds.

• Phonics is different from pronunciation. Pronunciation is about sounds, how we say them, and how they fit together into spoken words. Phonics is about the relationship between writing and sound.

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How do writing systems represent sounds?

• There are several types of writing systems. The earliest writing systems were picture writing. People simply drew pictures of the things they wanted to talk about.

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Ancient Mesopotamian Writing



• Over the years, the pictures were simplified and became symbols for whole words or word parts. These symbols are called logographs or ideographs.

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Development of the Chinese characters for “fish” and “mountain”



• In syllabic writing systems, each symbol stands for a whole syllable. You can’t separate the symbols into parts representing individual sounds.

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か　き　く　け　こ

ka ki ku ke koSanskrit

Japanese

Cherokee



• In alphabetic writing systems, each symbol represents one sound.

• However, none of these writing systems can represent the sounds of a language perfectly.

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Englishcat _ /k Q t/

milk _ /m I l k /

ship _ /S I p /

Russianслово _ /s l o v o / (“word”)

человек _ /t S E l o v y E k / (“person”)

друг _ /d r u k / (“friend”)


Learning to read in English

• English has an alphabetic writing system, so learners of English need to understand....

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The Alphabetic Principle:

Written words are composed of letters, and the letters represent the sounds

of spoken words.


Phonemic awareness

• A related concept is phonemic awareness. (This is a big buzzword* among reading teachers and researchers.)

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Phonemic Awareness:

The understanding that words are made up of individual sounds that can be separated,

counted and rearranged.

* A buzzword is a technical or specialized term that becomes very popular, so that you hear it everywhere in that field.


Skills that readers need

• The English spelling system doesn’t always represent sounds consistently, so learners need to develop two kinds of skills for reading words:

• Decoding skills for words that follow expected patterns. They learn to “sound out” predictable words, or put together individual sounds to figure out the whole word.

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catcatcatcatcat deskdeskdeskdeskdeskdesk


Skills that readers need

• Readers also need knowledge of “sight words”--the spellings that don’t follow predictable patterns. Learners need to memorize the spelling of words like

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youschool

lovewould

eyegive

and many more that aren’t spelled the way we expect.


Important concepts in phonics

• A grapheme is a written symbol that represents a sound--in English, the letters of the alphabet.

• A grapheme is not the same as a phoneme. Graphemes are written symbols, but phonemes are sounds. You can’t hear graphemes, and you can’t see sounds--only the symbols that represent them.

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The grapheme “g”can look like:

gg

G

G g

gg



• A digraph is a combination of two graphemes (letters) that together represent one sound. For example, in English, ph is a digraph that represents the sound /f/, and ee is a digraph that can represent the sound /iy/.

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phphone eeseed/f/ /iy/



• Consonant blends or consonant clusters are combinations of letters that represent a sequence of sounds. For example, str represents /str/, and thr represents /Tr/.

• (Consonant blends are different from digraphs. Digraphs represent a single sound. Consonant blends represent two or more sounds.)

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strstream/str/

thrthree/T r/

“th” is a digraph

three“thr” is a consonant blend

three



• Homonyms or homophones are words that sound alike, but they’re spelled differently, such as meet and meat or write, right, and rite. English has lots of homonyms.

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meetmeat

writerightrite


Letter-sound relationships: Consonants

• Consonants are usually easier to learn than vowels because they represent sounds more consistently.

• Many consonants usually represent just one sound:

• Others can represent more than one sound in different words:

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Letter b d f h j k l m n p r t v z

Sound b d f h d Z k l m n p r t v z

Letter c g s

Sound k or s g or d Z s , z , S , o r Z



• English has many consonant clusters. Some have two consonants: play, blue, true, twin, dry, cream, green, free, slow, swim, spot, stone, skin, smile, snow

• Some have three consonants: splice, spring, string, scrap.

• Consonant clusters can also come in the middle of words: farmer, basket, translate, include, system.

• Or at the ends of words: help, art, ant, lamp, sink, health, film, earth, arm, girl, ask, soft, sixth, against, first, world, ends.

• The letter x represents a consonant cluster all by itself (when it’s not at the beginning of a word): /ks/

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• There are several common consonant digraphs:

• sh = /S / ship, she, wish

• ch = /tS / chip, chance, watch

• th = /T / thank, three, bath

or /D / this, though, smooth

• ph = /f / phone, phrase, photograph

• wh = /w / or /hw/ which, whether, why (The pronunciation /w/ is now much more common than the more old-fashioned pronunciation /hw/.

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• Some consonant letters are not pronounced at all. We sometimes call them “silent letters.”

• talk, listen, climb, knife, night, sign, write, psychology

• Many of these silent letters represent sounds that used to be pronounced hundreds of years ago. People stopped pronouncing the sounds, but they kept writing the letters. These letters are like “ghosts” of dead sounds. We can still see them, but they’re not really there anymore.

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Letter-sound relationships: Vowels

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The letter a can represent:

/Q / as in cat

/e y / as in cape

/a / as in car

/E / as in care

/ ́ / as in around

• Vowels are more complicated to spell in English than consonants. NAE has 13-14 vowel sounds (including diphthongs), but only five vowel letters. This means that all the vowel letters must be used, alone or in combinations, to represent more than one vowel sound.



• In phonics instruction, teachers often talk about “long vowels” and “short vowels.” Each vowel letter is said to have a “long sound” and a “short sound.”

• It is very important to remember that the “short” vowels are not really shorter in duration than the “long” vowels. These are just names for two groups of sounds, not physical descriptions.

• For more information about short and long vowels, look at the tutorial called “Vowel Length in English” (http://teachingpronunciation.pbworks.com àClass Materials and Tutorials àClass Meeting 3) and the video “The Truth about Vowel Length” much farther down the page.)

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http://teachingpronunciation.pbworks.com

http://teachingpronunciation.pbworks.com

Letter-sound relationships: Short Vowels

• The “short sounds” for each vowel letter are:

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ă /Q / as in cap

ě /E / as in bed

ĭ /I / as in big

ŏ /a / as in top

ŭ as in cup


Letter-sound relationships: Long Vowels

• The “long sounds” for each vowel letter are:

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ā /e y / as in came

ē /i y / as in need

ī /a y / as in bite

ō /o w / as in soap

ū /u w / as in suit or /yu w / as in use

Sometimes we say the long sounds “say the vowel’s name.”


Letter-sound relationships: Other vowels

• The short and long vowel lists together contain only 10 sounds. English has 14 vowel sounds, including diphthongs. That’s one problem with the phonics categories of short vowels and long vowels. They don’t include:

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/U / as in book

/ç / as in caught

/a w / as in cow

/o y / as in boy



• In one-syllable words, if there’s only one vowel letter, it most often represents a short vowel sound.

• man, bed, big, dog, must

• When there are two vowel letters (a vowel digraph), the vowel is usually the long sound of the first vowel in the sequence. (“The first vowel says its name.”)

• main, bead, seed, lie, coat, due

• Of course, there are exceptions:

• most, do, both (one vowel letter = long sound)

• said, head, broad (two vowel letters = short sound)

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• The vowel digraph oo regularly represents two different sounds: /u w / and /U /.

• oo represents /u w /: food, soon, pool, boom, moon, root, tooth, proof.

• oo represents /U /: foot, book, good, look, cook, stood, wood, hook.

• At the end of a word, oo represents only /u w /, and not /U /: zoo, boo, too.

• Alas, there are exceptions here too, when oo doesn’t spell either /u w / or /U /: door, floor, blood, flood.

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• Silent e: When a word has one vowel letter in the middle and ends in the letter e, the word usually has a long vowel sound, and the final e is not pronounced.

• came, eve, mine, home, cute

• There are also many exceptions to this rule, including some very common words:

• have, here, there, were, where, give, come, done, one, some, none, move, gone, love, lose

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• NAE has three diphthongs (combinations of two vowel sounds that work together as one vowel). Here are some common spelling patterns for them:

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sound not at the end of a word at the end of a word

/ai/ iCe: bite, mine, quite, risey: by, try, my, why, replyie: lie, die, tie

/aw/ow: crowd, town, brownou: loud, out, found, south ow: cow, how, now, eyebrow

/oy/ oi: coin, noise, oil, moist oy: boy, joy, employ,annoy

“C” = any consonant



• If there’s an r or l after a vowel, it often affects the sound of the vowel.

• Vowels followed by r (r-colored vowels):• ar is often pronounced /ar/: car, hard, arm, harbor• or is often pronounced /ç r /: store, corn, fork, border

• Words with er, ir, or ur in a stressed syllable often have the sound / ́ r /: serve, herd, bird, shirt, turn, nurse

• Vowels followed by l (l-colored vowels):

• The letters al and all are often pronounced /ç l / (or /a l /): salt, fall, ball, tall. (This happens in talk and walk, too, even though the l is silent.)

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Reading longer words

• Dividing longer words up into smaller chunks can make it easier to read them.

• The chunks might be syllables:

strategy _ stra - te - gy

• The chunks could also be morphemes. Morphemes are parts of words that have their own meaning. For example, baseball contains two morphemes: base and ball. Dogs also has two morphemes: dog and the plural ending -s. Alligator only has one morpheme, even though it’s a longer word. It can’t be broken up into smaller, meaningful units.

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Reading longer words

• Some sequences of letters occur again and again in English words. For example, many words end in the morpheme -tion. We can’t predict the sound of this ending by combining the sounds of each letter. (It’s not pronounced /tiyon/!) But once learners realize that these letters represent /S ́ n /, it’s easier for them to

pronounce the ending when they see it in a new word.

• Becoming aware of these “chunks” of letters is an important step in learning to read new words.

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How much phonics do we need to teach?

• It’s good to teach and practice spelling patterns that students will see in many words.

• However, if we try to teach too much detail in phonics (or any other subject, for that matter), we risk overwhelming students with too much information, and they’ll have a hard time remembering any of it.

• We can’t possibly teach every possible spelling pattern. We need to choose and teach only the phonics patterns that are found in many common words. These will be most useful to students.

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Phonics instruction should fit your students

• We can’t teach phonics to all students in the same way. For example, teaching phonics to middle-school EFL learners who can already read in their first language is very different from teaching it to elementary-school native speakers who are just learning to read in their first language. Many phonics materials in textbooks or on the Internet are aimed at younger, native-speaker learners.

• If you use materials from these sources, think about how you can adapt them to fit your students’ needs. If you teach older students, you may need to make the topics less childish and limit the vocabulary to words your students are familiar with.

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Summary• Phonics helps students learn to read and write by

pointing out regular relationships between written letters and spoken sounds.

• We can help students learn to read by helping them practice the basic spelling patterns of English, but we shouldn’t overwhelm them with too much detail or too many rules.

• Phonics instruction should fit the needs of different groups of students. Think about the age, proficiency level, and interests of your students, and adapt materials to work best for them.

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Teaching Phonics - PBworksteachingpronunciation.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/51126378/Phonics... · • In alphabetic writing systems, each symbol represents ... * A buzzword is a technical