Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Disengaged students - Consonant Blends



I read the last comment in the article mentioned in my post on FB yesterday (13.3.2017). 

Here is the comment from the reader in the link in my post yesterday: superkate'smum said...
Hi,
My daughter is certainly one of the children you describe. I noticed her 'shut down' for the 1st time when she went into year 1. On the first day of school she met her new teacher who was in a rush. The teacher fired several questions at Kate very rapidly and Kate's eyes began to fixate and glaze over.
I have seen her shut down in class many times since. Kate was taught the alphabet correctly, with the appropriate voiced and voiceless sounds. The problem for her was blending the sounds together due to issues with auditory closure. She could not identify words if they were broken down, partially spoken, spoken with an accent, or spoken with the emphasis on the wrong syllable.
What a varied and complex condition dyslexia is!

Kate’s problem as above was blending the sounds together and what if these blending are not correctly taught to students prone to shutting down?

There are teachers teaching consonant blends in the wrong way and thus confusing kids who are prone to shutting down.

Children prone to shutting down will shut down if phonics is taught in the wrong way. Please listen to the sound tracks here to hear how alphabets are mispronounced. This is in a web site which supposedly teaches Phonics to beat dyslexia.”

The ‘teacher’ gives the phoneme of the word ‘blue’ as “ buh luh oo” (Bur lur oo). The ‘dyslexic child’ will surely be confused and definitely shut down.

For a start the phoneme for the alphabets ‘b’ and ‘l’ are wrong. Secondly, here the alphabets ‘bl’ is a consonant blend and has one phoneme/sound and not two. The total number of phonemes or sounds in the word blue is only 2 sounds – bl   and oo.

Also do listen to the phonemes of individual alphabets and the consonant blend of ‘bl’ as pronounced accurately by Genki phonics.
Phonics as taught by Genki Phonics

2 comments:

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