alpacas

More Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless

Jj is for Jottings 59.  More Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.

 

I was reminded a couple of days ago that there is more to say on the subject of minimal pairs ( see Jj is for Jottings 47.  Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.  You may wish to read/re-read this before continuing), when an intelligent, well-educated adult fell into a common trap – thinking that the letter s (frequently a plural at the end of a word, but sometimes in the middle) is always pronounced as /s/, whereas in fact it is often pronounced as /z/.  Continue reading →

Reading to Children – Some Statistics.

Jj is for Jottings 52.  Reading to Children – Some Statistics.

Even the alpacas are worried about current trends.

 

Here are some disquieting (but not unexpected) statistics and comments quoted by the guest, who is very experienced in education, at the launch of “Aa is for Alpacas”:

Research by Angela Emher in 2013 of 1263 parents discovered that only one in four of them or 25% read to their children daily.  They claimed that making dinner and doing housework, work commitments and exhaustion all interfered with the nightly routine of reading and sharing books with their children.  From this same survey though 20% of parents though were worried that their own children read less than they did at a similar age.  Is the bed time story being sacrificed because of busy lifestyle and at what cost to our future? Continue reading →

Rhyming, Climbing, Miming… (Part 1)

Jj is for Jottings 50.  Rhyming, Climbing, Miming… (Part 1)

Geisha had a little cria,
But in this pic you cannot see ‘er!
(With thanks to David for this one.)

 

Children are not often introduced to nursery rhymes, these days, and in fact most seem to have little exposure to rhymes in their early childhood.  People seem to think that the old-fashioned nursery rhymes are silly and don’t make sense Continue reading →

Nasal Sounds – And I Don’t Mean Blowing Your Nose!

Jj is for Jottings 49.  Nasal Sounds – And I Don’t Mean Blowing Your Nose!

Nina is demonstrating how to say /n/: see – her tongue is up behind her top front teeth and of course the air is coming down her nose. She is actually starting to say “Nnnnina”. Clever girl.

 

When you have a head cold, people say you sound “nasal”, or “nasally”.  In fact the opposite is true and you are in fact sounding denasal.  Here’s how it works: Continue reading →

Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.

Jj is for Jottings 47.  Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.

 

You may not have noticed this before, but many of our consonant sounds in English come in pairs.  The sounds are the same except for the fact that one uses the voice and the other does not.  You’ll see what I mean when I tell you what the pairs are (with the first of each pair being the voiceless one): /p,b/; /t,d/; /k,g/; /f,v/; /s,z/; /ch,j/; /sh and the sound in the middle of “measure”, which does not have a letter to represent it/; and /th/ – voiceless, as in “thumb” and voiced, as in “the, mother”.  A minimal pair is a pair of sounds or words that differ by only one feature, in this case voicing.  Other minimal pairs may differ by a whole sound eg. beg/big; bat/bag.

Before we go any further, I should explain that the slashes (/ /) mark the fact that we are talking about a sound as opposed to a letter name.  This is explained in more detail in the introduction to Aa is for Alpacas. 

When teaching the sounds made by letters, many adults (including teachers) fall into the trap of adding the schwa vowel to voiceless consonants, with the result that /p/, for example, ends up as /pə/ i.e. a voiceless consonant, /p/, with a voiced consonant , /ə/, added to the end.  It should be just /p/ followed by breath.  Voicing voiceless consonants to children confuses them in the following ways:

  • They find it more difficult to discriminate between sounds (because /pə/ sounds much more like /b/ than a proper voiceless /p/).
  • It leads to some children having difficulty in identifying where one sound ends and the next begins.
  • It makes blending sounds into a word difficult because the unnecessary voicing adds more sounds to the word. An example: You are trying to sound out the word.   The two consonants /h/ and /p/ are voiceless, and of course all vowels are voiced.  Therefore the only part of the word which you should voice is the /o/.   /h/, /o/, /p/ = hop.  If you voice the voiceless consonants, however, you get /hə/, /o/, pə/ – five sounds, three of which are vowels.  It will be much more difficult to perceive the word hop now.

Some children have difficulties with the voiced/voiceless phenomenon in their speech.  It’s usually confined to voicing /p,t,k/ or maybe even just one of those, but it is remarkable just how difficult it makes them to understand when they voice all three of them.  And it is quite difficult to remediate, too.

Please be aware of the voiceless sounds and given them a fair go – your child’s literacy will be much the better for it.

 

See also: https://educatingalpacas.com/more-minimal-pairs-voiced-vs-voiceless/

 

 

Schwa – The Undercover Vowel.

6 days after we said goodbye to April, Shikha had to have surgery on his paw to remove a foreign body (which didn’t turn out to be there after all!) He kept walking around shaking his leg, trying to get rid of the yellow bandage with smiley faces on it. It lasted all of 24 hours. He said It Didn’t Make Him Feel Like Smiling and he Wasn’t Putting Up With It Any Longer.

Jj is for Jottings 46.  Schwa – the Undercover Vowel.

There’s a sneaky little vowel which we say many times every day and are probably quite unaware of it.  Its name is “schwa”, its phonetic symbol is /ə/, and it sounds like a little grunt.  It’s the undercover vowel because Continue reading →

Happy Birthday, April.

You can see a distinct kink in her neck here.

Jj is for Jottings 44.  Happy Birthday, April.

 

Some time this month, April turned 20 years old.  That is quite an achievement, since we were told that the average lifespan of an alpaca is 15 years.  She is a lovely, gentle soul and was always an excellent mother.  Although, now I come to think of it, she and Geisha had many a ding dong fight until a few months ago, so maybe not quite as gentle.

A few months ago I noticed that her neck Continue reading →

Children or Feet? Using the Right Root.

Petra’s foot after David had done her toenails (ped=”foot” + filed her toenails. They’re actually cut rather than filed, but I couldn’t resist the pun.)

 

Jj is for Jottings 43.  Children or Feet?  Using the Right Root.

I’ve decided it’s time to air one of my pet language peeves because it crops up so frequently both in conversation and in the media.  I begin with a question: Do pedophiles love children or do they just love feet (which would be odd, but harmless)? Continue reading →