Jj is for Jottings 69. /l/ Sound is Different on the End.
You probably haven’t thought about this before, but /l/ (the slashes indicate the sound rather than the letter name) is pronounced differently when it is the last sound in an utterance or followed by a consonant, compared with when it is followed by a vowel. And if that sounds like gobbledygook, Continue reading
Jj is for Jottings 68. Communication Milestones.
Here is a chart put together by a group from Queensland and the National Office of Speech Pathology Australia which you may find useful.
Here is the link if you want to print copies.
www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/milestones
Jj is for Jottings 65. What Is Synthetic Phonics?
We’re just taking a break from the series on How to Raise a Reader – we’ll finish it next time.
Synthetic phonics means “building words from individual sounds”. For example, even if you had never seen it before, you could spell the word “step” Continue reading
Jj is for Jottings 62. Raising a Reader Part 2. Toddlers.
Continuing from the previous article (here), you cannot overestimate the importance of reading with a child at the toddler stage – for intellectual, social and emotional development. They take in everything: vocabulary and language structure, numbers and math concepts, colours, shapes, opposites and many other language concepts, animals, manners and all kinds of useful information about how the world works. What’s more, when you read out loud, Continue reading
Jj is for Jottings 61. Raising a Reader Part 1: The Baby.
There are various things parents can do to maximise their child’s chances of becoming a reader (i.e. someone who is proficient at reading, reads for pleasure and has no difficulty in using reading for information-seeking and the school curriculum.) We can divide this topic into 4 stages: Baby, Toddler, Emergent Readers and Early Readers. Question: What stage comes before the Baby stage? Continue reading
Jj is for Jottings 60. Partial Devoicing of Consonants.
As I said in the previous article “most voiced consonant sounds on the ends of words are actually devoiced , which means they end up sort of halfway between being voiced and unvoiced.” It would really be more accurate to say that they are partially devoiced. Continue reading
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
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
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:
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/
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
