Sounds of the alphabet O
Early last year a friend of mine asked me to see if I could
help his grandson who appeared to be stuck with his reading in the English
Language. His mother who spoke excellent English and was a school teacher said
that her son (say James – not his real name) could read some three letter words
but appears to have difficulty progressing in his reading. He was in primary
three.
On his first day James read some words in a simple book
until he came to the word ‘to’ which he read as ‘toe’. I wrote the word ‘do’ on
a paper and asked him to sound it out and he said ‘doe’. I asked him as to why
he sounded out these two words the way he did and he quickly said that his
teacher told him that the letter O is for octopus and that he was born in
October.
His teacher apparently had not told him that the letter ‘o’
had other sounds too. As James’s English was exceptionally good as he spoke
English at home I had no problem explaining the different sounds of the vowels
and some consonants. Within 3 months I weaned him off.
Some of the sounds of the letter ‘o’ are:
O as in Oak, oath, obey, overO as in Oar, oil, oral, orbitO as in Objection, oblige, of, observeO as in Octopus, odd, orange, OctoberO as in One, one’sO as in Onion, oven (pronounced wrongly by many people in Sabah)O as in Ooh, oozeO as in Out, outer, outfit, outgrow
Of course, the
teacher does not have to teach all the sounds of the alphabet O. All she has to
do is to inform the kids that most of the alphabets in the English language
have more than one sound.
26 alphabets represent 44 sounds it is claimed. But I would
say that they have far more sounds than the 44 phonemes but let us not go
there.
Points to ponder:
Would as many kids shut down if there were 44 letters to
represent each of the 44 phonemes?
There are 247 characters in the Tamil alphabet. Do kids learning
to read in Tamil shut-down?
2 comments:
Those 'experts' are narrowly focussed on the sounds of English language, I believe without a wider knowledge of sounds in other classical languages, which our children have no problem reading. Their awareness in the classical languages like Tamil, their structure and the nature of sounds in these languages, is lacking depth, to say the least. They seem to go on the same grove over and over what they have been believing in and teaching/writing about, all these years. Teaching English pronunciation of letter sounds wrongly in countries which adopted English as their second language is the main cause of children shutting down, we who know languages such as Tamil , do readily understand this as the problem. If teaching English as first language in the western countries and Australia, was done correctly, then there should be no 'shut down kids' over there. That is not the case. That means they themselves are not teaching all the relevant sounds of the alphabets correctly and then turn around to say the kids have learning problems . There is something of a twisted logic.
Mr.Kandiah, you said: "They seem to go on the same grove over and over what they have been believing in and teaching/writing about, all these years."
It is said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. This appears to be the case with teaching the English Language.
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