English is a very interesting language. Yes, the spelling system is complex and lots of people throw their hands up in despair at all the exceptions. We will explore these weird and wonderful features of the English spelling system over time (because we are mega word-nerds at SPELD NSW) but for today let’s consider the sounds or better the phonemes!
In English phonology we have approximately 44 phonemes. I say approximately as we must allow for variations in pronunciation and accents. As I have experienced in many teacher professional learning sessions, teachers from various backgrounds explaining to me how they pronounce words differently to me. Just recently it was drawn to my attention that some words that we consider homophones in Australia are not homophones in Irish English! Fascinating!
For this blog, let’s agree on 44 phonemes in English. Of those, 20 are vowel phonemes and 24 are consonant phonemes. Note I am only talking about the ‘sounds’ not the spellings, of which there are over 250.
If you want to go deeper into this, please watch our free member webinar on Talking Phonemes but for now, here are some points I find interesting and like to share with people:
- Vowels give volume to your words. Try shouting the word ‘cat’ with the /a/. You can’t.
- Vowels are defined by how rounded (or not) the lips are while we say the phoneme and where the tongue is positioned in the mouth. Vowels can be just one pure sound like /ee/ or /oo/ but others can be what we call diphthongs where the mouth starts in one position and move while producing the phoneme to another position. For example, /ay/ starts like you are going to say /a/ but ends like /ee/: start open mouth and end with a smile! But they are still the one vowel sound.
- Consonants are defined by the position of your articulators, the relative continuity of the phoneme and whether your voice box is being activated. So, something like the phoneme /f/, the voice box is not activated (we call this unvoiced), the teeth are touching the bottom lip and the ‘sound’ is being produce by the friction of air as it passes through the lips and teeth. The phoneme is ‘continuous’ because as long as your breath lasts, you can hold that pure phoneme. By contrast, the /b/ is a phoneme that pops out of your mouth, and you cannot ‘hold’ the sound. It is what we call a ‘stop’ or a ‘plosive’ phoneme. For /b/ the voice box IS activated, and the ‘articulators’ are both lips coming together to build pressure before the release of air as we say the sound.
You don’t need to know all the linguistic terminology to successfully teach a phonics lesson well, you just need to have some understanding of these features to draw students awareness to them. What is helpful to be aware of is that many consonants come in ‘pairs’. This means that 2 sounds are essentially exactly the same phoneme but one has the voice box ‘on’ and the other has it ‘off’. For examples, the partner to /b/ is /p/. Why does this matter? Some students might confuse the two because they are so similar. If teachers are aware that this is a potential point of confusion, we can remind them, ‘this is a voice off/on’ sound. ‘
As teachers we are not performing speech therapy. We are teaching students to be aware of the phonemes they are producing and how letter patterns represent those sounds. The phoneme-grapheme connection is important. That way we can be inclusive and account for all accents and dialects when teaching students how to read and write.
Watch our free member webinar, Talking Phonemes now to learn more. For further learning, the webinar ‘Teaching New Sound-Spelling Correspondences’ from our Teaching Reading in K-2 series will give you an excellent and easy to use instructional model to use in your classroom!
