As we have seen in previous articles, phonemes are the smallest unit of sound. They are English voices. And, the symbols you use to represent them in writing are called graphics. So, what is voice? Voice is a system that connects phonemes (sounds) with graphics (symbols) to reading and spelling.
There are various types of sketches – single letters, excavations, three pictures, etc. Sketch is essentially the written form of the smallest sound unit, i.e. phoneme.
Single letter:
Many sketches are single letters such as “a”, “b’, ‘c”, etc.
Multiple letter primes:
Some graphics are composed of two or more letters, such as “SH”, “CH”, “AI”, “OA”, and “IGH”.
Digraphs and Trigraphs:
A dig is a prime number with two letters (e.g., “sh” in “ship”) and a trigraph has three letters (e.g., “igh” in “light”).
Variations:
In English, a phoneme can be represented by a different sketch (e.g., /k/sound can be spelled as “c”, “k” or “ck”), and a cheme can represent different phonemes with different words (e.g., “ea” grupereme in “bread”, “great”, “great” and “pear”).
Phonetics helps learners decode (read) and encode (mantra) words by understanding the relationship between sound and letters. Voice is based on phonetic awareness because it requires the ability to hear and manipulate a single sound (phoneme).
Phonetic awareness is the ability to recognize phonemes through hearing or seeing words. Poetic consciousness is the ability to transform sound into spoken words. Converting phonemes to sketches is not part of phonemes or poetic consciousness. This is the more advanced science of English, which is established as phonemes and poetic consciousness.
Phonetic awareness is crucial to the correct pronunciation of English. For example, the words “cat” and “sat” are separated only by phonemes /c /and /s /. Phonemes are written between certain countries//slashes. Phoneme consciousness is crucial to many different things when it comes to reading – character principles, decoding, spelling and even spelling mapping.
Phoneme consciousness activities
- Phoneme isolation: Use words to identify individual sounds.
- “What is the first voice in the word ‘cat’?” (/k/).
- “What is the last voice in the word ‘sit’?” (/t/).
- Phoneme blending: Listen to a series of individual spoken languages and combine them together to form a single word.
- “What words do these sounds produce: /s / /a / /t /?” (Saturday).
- Phoneme segmentation: Typing a word into a separate voice.
- “How many sounds are there in the word “ship”?” (/sh//i//p/-3 sound).
- “Say the word ‘dog’ once.” (/dog/).
- Phonema deletion: Recognize what is left when removing phonemes from words.
- “What is the ‘smile’ without /s/?” (miles).
- “Say ‘Shopping Cart’ No /k/.” (Art).
- Phoneme addition: Make new words by adding phonemes to existing words.
- “If you add /s/ to the beginning of ‘top’, what word do you get?” (stop).
- Phoneme substitution: Change a phoneme in a word to form a new word.
- “Change /sh / in ‘shop’ to /m /. What is the new word?” (mop).
- “Change /g/ in ‘Tugboat’ to /b/. What is a new word?” (bathtub).
So, what is voice?
Phonetics is a field of research on sound physics. Just like where and how sound comes from or is perceived physically – its acoustic properties, such as studies of sound organs, tongue, lips and other parts of the sound that produce sound.
Syllables and phonemes
Phonemes are individual units of sound and should not be confused with syllables, they are different things. Syllables are blocks in a word or word rhythm. For example, in hipp-o-pot-um-us, there are 5 syllables, but 11 phonemes.
Building a solid foundation in English literacy requires discerning aspects of the language and keeping the learning course consistent in a sequential and organized manner. And, that’s what we do in the Unicminds English course.
Hopefully this is useful for gaining a basic understanding of phonetic awareness. Thank you for reading this article.
You may want to read: English pronunciation – Short vowel sounds vs. Long vowel sounds, Canberra’s kid-friendly museum, and personalized online courses for children
