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Random Tidbits About Our Language Reading Teachers Should Know

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a 4-day LETRS training session.  LETRS stands for Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling.  
Random Tidbits About Our Language That Reading Teachers Should Know: These facts should be useful for teachers of reading!

The recent 4-day session was the second of three sessions. It's exhausting and overwhelming stuff, but it's amazing and quite valuable to know as a teacher of reading. Here are some interesting pieces of information I learned from some of the training.

1. Vowels are open, unconstricted sounds.  

The English Language has 18 vowel sounds: 5 short vowel sounds; 5 long vowel sounds; 3 r controlled vowels /er/ (spelled er, ir, or ur), /ar/, and /or/; diphthongs /oi/, /ow/; and the vowel teams /aw/, /oo/ (as in book) and /oo/ as in (as in pool).  This doesn't include the schwa sound, which takes on a short u or a short i sound in unaccented syllables.

2. Consonant sounds

The English Language has 25 consonant sounds:  /p/,/b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /m/, /n/, /ng/, /f/, /v/, /th/ (unvoiced, as in three), /th/ (voiced, as in those), /s/, /z/, /sh/, /zh/ (as in pleasure), /ch/, /j/, /y/, /wh/, /w/, /h/, /l/, and /r/.

3. Short vowel sounds

Fifty percent of words have short vowel sounds.

4. Predictable

The English language isn't as unpredictable as people think:
  • 50% of words are predictable by rule
  • 36% of words are predictable by rule with 1 error, usually a vowel
  • 10% of words will be predictable with morphology and word origin taken into account
  • Fewer than 4% of words are true oddities.

This is just the beginning of what I've learned from this training. 

See also THIS POST.

Random Tidbits About Our Language That Reading Teachers Should Know: These facts should be useful for teachers of reading!


3 comments:

  1. Interesting! I can't wait to read about what else you learned from your training.

    Michelle
    Teach123

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michelle,

    Thanks! It was an excellent training. There will be more "tidbits" as I go through my notes!

    Sally

    ReplyDelete
  3. Guess you really should have the time to go back to basics in our field. Actually I kind of forgot about some of these already.

    ReplyDelete

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