We created recordings of the sounds associated with the letters and letter combinations in English. This resource would be helpful for anyone who is teaching a child to read.
Intercom — Startups get 90% off Intercom + 1 year of Fin AI Agent free
Startups get 90% off Intercom + 1 year of Fin AI Agent free
Promoted
Maker
📌
We created recordings of the sounds associated with the letters and letter combinations in English. This resource would be helpful for anyone who is teaching a child to read.
In order to “sound out” a word, a person needs to see patterns of letters and think of sounds that those letters represent. Successful readers understand a complex system of correspondences between symbols and sounds. They see the letter ‘m,’ for example, and they think the sound /m/, like the sound at the beginning of the word ‘mine.’ When they do that for each sound in a word, they are “sounding it out,” and when they blend all of those sounds together, they have decoded that word.
So, in order to teach a child to read, instructors need to teach them this system of sound-symbol correspondence. Sometimes these correspondences are relatively straightforward, like with the letter ‘m’: it almost always makes the same sound, and other symbols only rarely make its sound. But sometimes these correspondences are tricky. For example, does that ‘th’ digraph make the voiced sound like in the word ‘this’ or the unvoiced sound as in the word ‘think’? Does that ‘ea’ letter combination make the sound like in the word ‘seat,’ the word ‘head,’ the word ‘bear,’ or the word ‘heart’? And what’s with the sound that ‘a’ makes in ‘cat’ compared with the sound it makes in ‘fan’ (depending on your accent)? The orthography of the English language does not make things easy on early readers or on those trying to teach them!
Each of these nuances of sound and spelling have important implications for how to best teach a child to read. It is important for instructors to produce the sounds of our language (the ‘phonemes’ that make up each word) precisely and consistently. One might think that, if one knows how to read, then one is prepared to teach at this level of precision, but, unfortunately, that’s simply not the case. Sometimes it’s harder for fluent adult readers to discern the subtle differences in the sounds that comprise our words because it’s been so long since we first learned to decode them, because our understanding of spelling my complicate the basic foundation that students need to learn first, and because our accents may not be the same as our students’.
