NOTICE: This page is copyrighted 1998 to Johanna Rubba
Phonology, Phonics, and English Spelling
"... despite a far from perfect letter-to-sound correlation, English spelling nonetheless is reasonable systematic" Kaplan 1989:36
Contents of this page:
Definitions
English Phonology
English Spelling
Phonics
Phonograms: an example
of a phonics teaching strategy
Recommended Reading
Exercises
Definitions:
• PHONOLOGY: The branch of linguistics which studies the use of sound in human language (inculding phonetics, the study of the physical nature of speech sounds and speech production). Phonology/phonetics have been studied in detail for about 200 years. The mission of phonology is to understand how speech sounds and phonetic features are organized in a language so that they can be used to create CONTRAST, the differences between sounds that allow the creation of different words, which can then serve the purpose of symbolizing the thousands of concepts that constitute our mental world.
• ENGLISH SPELLING ( = English orthography): A system of using written symbols (letters and combinations of letters) to represent the spoken language. The history of English spelling begins with the origins of English in the British Isles 1500 years ago (500 A.D. onwards). American English spelling has been pretty much fixed in its present form since the middle of the 19th century.
• PHONICS: A literacy-teaching method that trains learners to use certain regularities and signals in the English spelling system to help them DECODE words in reading (to decode a word is to match the letters in the word to sounds in the language, thereby recognizing which word the string of letters spells). Phonics was developed in the 20th century; it has gone in and out of fashion in schools. It is currently experiencing a resurgence of interest; it is being combined with current knowledge about children's learning processes and included in language arts materials nationwide. Phonics is often contrasted with the approach known as 'whole language', but 'whole language' is hard to define. Phonics does include some holistic teaching strategies (see the discussion of phonograms below). Many modern literacy-training packages (including those approved by the state for use in California public schools) integrate phonics instruction with plentiful reading and writing activities.
Letters are used to represent sounds in phonology, spelling, and phonics instruction (a letter is a printed or written character that represents a speech sound). However, these three ways of representing spoken language use letters differently. The same letter may have a different value in a book on phonetics vs. a phonics book vs. the way it is used in English spelling.
In phonology, letters are used to represent sounds directly and uniquely: in phonetic alphabets, a letter has one and only one pronunciation (although there are numerous phonetic alphabets in use, e.g. in linguistics textbooks vs. in dictionaries). The letters have names, some of which are the same as the names in English spelling and phonics ('see' for / c / 'kay' for / k /; some are different (schwa for / \ /; 'angma' for / ˜ /). In this text, I will always enclose phonological or phonetic letters in either slash brackets / / or square brackets [ ].
In phonics, letters are also used; they vary slightly from program to program. They have names such as 'long a', and there are names for classes of symbol types, e.g. 'digraphs' (a combination of two different letters used to represent a single sound, such as {sh} the first sound in the word <shoe>). Here, I enclose phonics symbols in curly brackets { }.
In English spelling, the letters have names ('ay', 'bee', 'see'). They are used in certain conventional ways to signal certain information about pronunciation (there is some more detail on this below). English spelling is much more systematic than most people realize. We will enclose English orthographic symbols in angle brackets < >.
/ /, [ ] = phonology/phonetics symbols
{ } = phonics symbols
< > = English spelling letters
For complete discussions of phonetics and phonology, consult an introductory linguistics book. The component of English phonology most important to spelling is the English phoneme inventory: the letters in our alphabet are used to represent phonemes. Phonemes are the individual sounds that words are composed of in our mental lexicon — our mental inventory of English vocabulary.
Morphophonemic rules (different ways of pronouncing suffixes such as past tense <-ed>, for example) are also important: a particular morpheme may have fewer spellings than it has pronunciations (for example, the <-s> suffix for plural nouns is sometimes pronounced /s/ and sometimes /z/; the <-ed> suffix is pronounced three ways: /d/, /t/, and /\d/. In some cases, there is more than one spelling for a particular morpheme (for example, the past tense marker, usually spelled <ed>, is spelled <t> in such words as <slept>, <dreamt>, accurately reflecting its pronunciation). Processes are not shown in English spelling; in most spelling systems throughout the world, the letters represent phonemes, not allophones. Processes are the modifications we make in the feature makeup of phonemes when we produce speech, such as aspiration -- the strong puff of air that accompanies /p/, /t/ or /k/ at the beginning of a word -- and flapping -- the pronunciation of both /t/ and /d/ as a voiced alveolar flap in words such as <metal>, <medal>.
Because processes often destroy the contrast between phonemes (for instance, making /t/ and /d/ indistinguishable in word pairs such as <metal>, <medal>), they can cause spelling errors. For instance, the Canadian city-name <Ottowa> has been spelled <Oddowa>; the word <tidied> has been rendered as <titied>. In such cases, the speller has to guess between two possible phonemes that the flap can represent -- in this case, /t/ or /d/ -- and makes the wrong guess.
English uses its alphabet to represent speech in numerous ways. Here are the basic components of the spelling system: vowel letters, consonant letters, double letters, letter combinations, and silent letters.
• Vowel letters: a e i o u (w, y sometimes
are used to represent vowel sounds)
• Consonant letters: b c d f g h j k l
m n p q r s t v w x y z
• Double letters (a sequence of two identical
letters):
-
Vowels: ee, oo
-
Consonants: all consonants are frequently used doubly except h, j, k, q,
w, x, and y. Examples:
apple, summer, toss, dizzy, etc.
• Letter combinations: a sequence of two
or more different letters used to represent single sounds or sound sequences.
There are two categories of letter combinations:
BLENDS and DIGRAPHS. In blends, two (or more) letters represent
two (or more) sounds in sequence: < bl > represents [ bl ], for example,
and < spr > represents [ spr ]. In digraphs,
the two letters represent a single sound. For example, the two-letter
digraph < th > represents the single sound [ q
] as in the word <think>; the digraph < ea > is used to represent
various single vowels: [ i ] in <meat>, [ ´
] in <head>, [ e ] in <great>.
• Silent letters: Many words contain letters
that are not pronounced, such as the <gh> in <night>, the <b>
in <thumb>, or the <k> of <knee>. Although it might seem that
silent letters are useless appendages that make learning to spell more
difficult, they are often cues to how to pronounce a word: the <gh>
following an <i>, for example, signals that the <i> is to be pronounced
[ ay ], not [ ^ ]; compare <fit> with <fight>.
These components are used rather systematically to represent the phonemic makeup of words. The system seems chaotic because there are subsystems: sometimes logical, sometimes the illogical product of historical spelling practices that just never changed. The mixture of the logical and illogical systems creates the 'rules with exceptions' aspect that English spelling is famous for (i before e except after c and when sounded as 'a' as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh').The following paragraphs present just a few examples of subregularities in English spelling.
<c> represents two sounds: /s/ and /k/ (both are present in <accent> = /æks´nt/). <c> represents /s/ when it precedes <e>, <i>, or <y>; usually it represents /k/ in other positions, e.g.: <cent>, <city>, <cyst> vs. <cat>, <cut>, <close>, <cream>.
The /k/ sound can be spelled in various ways: <k> as in <kid>, <c> as in <cat>, <ck> as in <back>, <ch> as in <ache>, <q> as in <quite>. One regularity in this variety of spellings is that <ck> cannot be used at the beginning of a word, but only in the middle or at the end. We find words such as <tackle> and <back>, but not *ckat. (The asterisk * means that the following word violates a rule and is impossible within the system.)
A double consonant is most often a cue to the pronunciation of a preceding vowel, especially in words of more than one syllable. Consider the pair <comma>, <coma>. The double <m> in the first word tells you that the <o> is pronounced / a /; the single <m> of the second tells you it is pronounced /o/. The pair <tapping>, <taping> illustrates the same principle.
Another regularity about double consonants is that, while they often appear in the middle or at the end of a word, they never appear at the beginning; compare staff, bass, tall, hammer, apple with fine, soap, late, must, pole. Spellings such as *mmust or *ppole do not occur.
Single consonants also provide cues to vowel pronunciation when contrasted with the use of a singe consonant followed by silent <e>. consider these pairs:
tap vs. tape
mat vs. mate
pip vs. pipe
grim vs. grime
met vs. mete
mop vs. mope
Although the final <e> is not pronounced and therefore might seem useless, it is actually an important cue that tells us how to pronounce the preceding vowel.
This is a very brief description of how English spelling works. More can be found in Dechant (1969) and other books on phonics.
Phonics is a method for teaching English spelling which exploits various factors: (a) what regularities there are in the English spelling system; (b) what is known about how children handle reading and writing cognitively (for instance, that children may not have mastered certain sounds upon beginning reading instruction, and that they focus more strongly on the beginnings of words than the ends). Phonics proceeds in a sequence intended to make the complex subregularities of English spelling easier to handle for both student and teacher. Phonics must be distinguished from phonetics/phonology, which are scientific attempts to analyze the English sound system, not its spelling system. Phonics does not strive so much for scientific accuracy as it does for finding regularity in the system for representing sounds with letters, and presenting those regularities in a scope and sequence that make it easier for a learner to master. Therefore many of its practices, such as distinguishing long from short vowels, are not phonologically accurate (length does not differentiate English vowel phonemes from one another; tongue height does). There was a time in the English language (ca. A.D. 500 to around A.D. 1500) when length did differentiate vowel phonemes, and the spelling system indicated this. But because English pronunciation continued to change after its spelling system became relatively fixed between 1200-1500 A.D., the spelling reflects the earlier period of English pronunciation. The phonics description of English spelling is based partly on the earlier pronunciation system.
The basic strategy of phonics, therefore, is to find whatever regularities there are in English spelling and teach these to learners in a sequence, at a pace, and with teaching techniques which respect the learner's cognitive abilities, whether these be the developing abilities of young children or the full mastery of the sound system found in illiterate adults.
Phonograms: an example of a phonics teaching strategy
There are many regularities of English spelling that phonics presents to the learner; for detail, the reader may want to look at the books on phonics listed at the end of this text. One interesting regularity that phonics exploits is the notion phonogram, that is, a sequence of letters at the end of a word that occurs with high frequency and relatively consistent pronunciation. Two examples are <ill> and <ack>. Many words contain these letter sequences with the pronunciation / ˆl / and / æk / respectively: <bill, pill, dill, till, gill, kill, chill, Jill, fill, sill, shill, hill, mill, rill, will, quill, spill, skill, still>, etc.; <back, pack, tack, Jack, sack, shack, hack, Zack, lack, knack, rack, wack, stack, flack, smack, snack, black>, etc. Teaching phonograms as wholes to children makes sense: children have more difficulty with individual sounds at the middle and especially ends of words than at the beginning; but children do have the capability to learn and process holistically, that is, treating the phonogram as an undivided 'chunk' rather than a sequence of several letters. Combining this holistic ability to learn phonograms with their facility in recognizing individual sounds at the beginnings of words should ease children's mastery in spelling and recognizing large numbers of words. Games in which children supply different beginning sounds for given phonograms, for example, will allow them to use their knowledge of the spoken word to 'create' and then spell and recognize many commonly occurring words.
You will find the following books useful sources of information about phonics and English spelling:
Lehr, Fran, and Jean Osborn. 1994. Reading, language, and literacy: instruction for the twenty-first century. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Kennedy Library call # LB 1573 R2795 1994. Up-to-date, with sections on phonemic awareness and current teaching methodology.
Dechant, Emerald. 1969. Linguistics, phonics, and the teaching of reading. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher. Kennedy Library call # LB 1573 D346. Teaching methods and some linguistics observations may be out of date, but much useful information on how the English spelling system works.
Durkin, Dolores. 1972. Phonics, Linguistics, and Reading. NY: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University. Kennedy Library call # LB 1573 D835. Rather confusing presentation, but good information on the English spelling system.
Using Callary's list of English consonant phonemes (p. 303), make lists of all the actual English words that occur with some consonant at the beginning and each of the given phonograms. (Going down the list of consonant phonemes in Callary, try each phoneme as a beginning sound for a word with the phonogram as the rest of the word. Remember, consonant spellings vary; so 'knee' counts as /n/ followed by the phonogram <ee>).
Example: phonogram <ig>: /p/ <pig>, /b/ <big>, /d/ <dig> etc.
After trying single consonant sounds, try to find five words that begin with more than one consonant sound and end with the phonogram. Example: phonogram <ig>, /spr/ <sprig>, /br/ <brig>.
Work with these phonograms:
1. <ob> (pronounced / ab /, as in <job>)
2. <uff> (pronounced / \f /, as in <stuff>)
3. <ell> (pronounced / 'l /, as in <sell>)
EXERCISE 2: DEVELOPING LESSONS
Working alone or with one or two fellow students, make up a short lesson using phonograms (or research another regularity of English spelling from the sources above, and create a lesson based on it). Be creative! Phonograms lend themselves to rhyming poetry, for example, and it can also be fun for children to make up new words that don't exist (like <shig>) and assign meanings to them.