Jj is for Jottings 70. The End of a Word is Not Always the End.
In traditional tests of articulation (speech sounds) and when we are sounding out words in reading, we think very much in terms of sounds at the beginning, in the middle and on the end of a word. In the case of early stage reading and spelling using 3-sound words, we are asking, “What sound can you hear at the beginning of the word?” “What sound can you hear at the end of the word? “What sound can you hear in the middle of the word?” At this early stage, the 3-sound words will be consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC), eg. “top”. Less common 3-sound words are left until the children are secure in their ability to sound out CVC words, and then they can handle trickier combinations such as VCC (“and”) and CCV (“star”). So, as far as sounding out and spelling are concerned, the end of a word truly is the end.
Manuel volunteered to pose as a CVC word, with the first consonant being his head end, the vowel being his middle and his back end being the last consonant. What a pity this word is so scruffy!
When it comes to speech sounds, however, in the same way that /l/ being followed by a vowel is different from when it is at the end of an utterance or followed by a consonant (see https://educatingalpacas.com/l-sound-is-different-on-the-end/ , the pronunciation of speech sounds is affected by surrounding sounds because we don’t speak words as individual entities, but rather in combination with other words – as phrases or sentences. So the only sound that is really on the end is the final sound of the utterance. (For simplicity’s sake, I’m using “utterance”, which means whatever is said – of any length – so it covers words, phrases and sentences.) When a CVC word is followed by a word beginning with a vowel, the last sound in the word suddenly becomes a middle sound rather than an end sound, eg. “cat and dog”. If we were to pronounce /t/ in “cat” as if it were a single word or on the end in that utterance, we would break up the flow of speech; if we pronounce it as if it were in the middle, the utterance flows smoothly. Try it and you’ll see what I mean. So, as far as speech is concerned, a sound is really on the end only when it is the end of an utterance, not just the end of a word.
We’ll go into single words versus connected speech a little more in a later post.