Chapter 5 – Representing sound in writing
Consider the following statements and click to reveal the answer.
1. What is phonological awareness?
Answer:
Phonological awareness is the explicit awareness of units of sound and how they work in speech.
2. What are the following:
- A syllable?
- Onset?
- Rime?
- A phoneme?
Answer:
a. A syllable is a group of sounds that act as a unit of rhythm in speech and that is usually made up of a combination of consonants and vowels.
b. Onset is the consonant(s) at the beginning of a syllable.
c. Rime is the remaining part of a syllable, including a vowel or vowel-like sound and possibly one or more consonants.
d. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word.
3. How many vowel sounds and consonant sounds are there in English?
Answer:
There are approximately 20 vowel sounds and 24 consonant sounds in most accents of English.
Answer:
The IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet that is used to write sounds precisely, including in some dictionaries.
5. What is phonics teaching?
Answer:
Phonics teaching is teaching children sound-symbol correspondence, i.e. to match sounds with letters and letter combinations and to blend and segment these to create words.
6. Name three common consonant digraphs.
Answer:
Three common consonant digraphs are ‘ch’, ‘th’ and ‘sh’.
7. What is the visual strategy for learning spellings that was suggested by Margaret Peters?
Answer:
The visual strategy for learning spellings that was suggested by Margaret Peters is ‘Look, Cover, Write, Check’.
8. Why is it important to teach fluent letter formation early in the teaching of handwriting?
Answer:
It is important to teach fluent letter formation early in the teaching of handwriting because poor letter formation inhibits the correct joining of letters and bad habits in letter formation are hard to change.
