Wednesday, February 4, 2009

A Lesson in Phonics

Most children get a brief introduction to phonics in elementry school, but few adults are concious of phonics when reading and writing. When I was a child, I met with a private tutor three times a week for four years. During that time I recieved a much more indepth phonics training. Even as an adult, I have a very small site vocabulary. When I read, I sound out each word and decode its meaning. When I write, I carefully select the most probable phonetic spelling of the word.

If you aren’t me, you many already have an inharent understanding of phonics. You may also be cabably of learning a phonics lesson without writing each letter or letter combination in rice while stating its phoneme 78 times. So I’ll simply give you a brief phonics lesson and allow you to retain of it what you will. If you want a more indepth approach find a tutor familiar with the Orton-Gillingham method of multi-sensory education, and sacrifies a coupe hundred hours to your phonics training.

There are 42 phonemes in the English language, even though there are only 26 letters. This means that there are several letters that can make multiple sounds. There are also sounds that require multiple letters to spell. Some phonemes can be spelled multiple ways. Below is a list of all 42 English phonemes, along with each of their spellings (or at least of the spellings I can remember off the top of my head).

ā – a, a-consonent-e, ae, ai, ay, eigh, ey
a – a
b – b
k – c, k, ck
d – d
ē – e, e-consonent-e, ee, ea, ie, y, i, ey
e – e, ea,
f – f, ph, gh
g – g, gh
h – h
ī – i, i-consonant-e, igh, y
i – i
j – j, g, dge
l – l
m – m, mb
n – n, kn
ō – o, o-consonent-e, oa, oe, ough, ow
o – o, au, ough, ou,
p – p
kw – qu
r – r, wr, er, ir, ur
s – s, c
t – t
ū – u, u-consonent-e, ew, ue
u – u, a, o, e, au, ou
v – v, f
w – w
ks – x
y – y
z – z, s
ōō – oo, u, u-consonent-e, ew
oo – oo, u
oi – oi, oy
ou – ou, ow
aw – aw, au, a, o
ar – ar
sh – sh, si, ti, ci, che
hw – wh
ch – ch, tch
th – th
ng – ng
zh – s

I graduated from tutoring more than 17 years ago, so I may have missed a few of the less probable spellings. I feel like there should be more for the spellings of the soft vowel sounds of a and i, but I can’t think of any others off the top of my head. If you can think of any sound spellings I missed, please feel free to make me look bad.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Oops, I forgot to include y as an spelling for the sound i (such as in gym). Clearly this is a sign that my memory has failed me and I likely left at least a half a dozen vowel sounds off the list. I really hate vowels.

Ali McCart said...

No joke! Phenomes are a pain in the butt. Do you ever wish you'd grown up in a Spanish-speaking country, or at least someplace that is more phonetic?

Genevieve said...

your blog is the ultimate nerd-o-sphere. Next week you should post pictures of all warren's rusty metal and write quick blurps about how it was acquired.