For instance, lore and love have different vowel sounds, even using the same vowel. Other eye rhymes such as heard/beard are not pronounced the same and might often cause confusion because despite similarities in spelling, their pronunciation is a lot different. This is an effective exercise to make students aware of how flexible and common the /ə/ sound is in English. In fact, any vowel can be pronounced as the schwa sound.Ī great exercise is to take any grade-appropriate text and omit all /ə/ sounds and ask students to retrieve the right schwa spelling. All these words spell the schwa sound differently. Such activities can be particularly helpful when teaching common English sounds such as the schwa (/ə/) as in sof a, s upply, incredible, gall op, en emy.
This is a fun activity that teaches students how a single sound can take different spelling forms.
In this manner, even if the student forgets say how to spell morale, knowing its pronunciation will more likely help the student retrieve/recall the correct spelling form.Ĥ Teaching Spelling Through Pronunciation Such sentences emphasize that even if these words eye-rhyme, (seem as though they have the same sound) they don’t. You can also choose to contrast the pronunciation of words that are spelled with the same letter groupings, as with the sentence "Adding too much flour will make the dough too tough to work with. For instance, the sentence "The farmer’s crop didn’t yield as expected and he feared the King’s Knights would wield their swords to collect the tax" help students memorize the letter patterns as well as the sounds. It’s best to pair such words when teaching them to ensure that for each word, spelling and pronunciation are learned together.Īnother way to reinforce spelling and pronunciation is to teach similarly spelled words in sets. Other words worth paying attention to are word pairs like cube/cub and pan/pane. Morale - /mə-ˈral/, the stress is on the second syllable
Moral - /ˈmȯr-əl/, the stress is on the first syllable For instance, moral and morale are stressed differently when spoken out loud, and this is a clue they can use to learn to understand which spelling to use for which concept. It’s important to make students aware of how differences in spelling affect pronunciation. This lack of complete letter-to-sound matching is the case for many more words than we would like to admit, such as Worcester, the name of an English city which, to many students’ surprise, is pronounced ˈwu̇s-tər.
For instance, Wednesday is pronounced ˈwenz-(ˌ)dā, where the first ‘d’ is silent. Students should know that spelling is rarely faithfully reflected in pronunciation. 1 Raise Awareness of the Pronunciation-spelling RelationshipĬhildren are never too young to learn that pronunciation and spelling are closely interrelated.