What is Phonetics
Having heard about phonics, phonemes, phonetics, phonemic awareness, and other ‘phon’ words being floated around, One may wonder what difference they all make. Well, don’t get frightened; we are here for you. Firstly, have you noticed that words with ‘phon‘ always have something to do with sounds, such as phones, microphones, earphones, etc.? This means you should think of ‘sound’ when you hear or see a ‘phon’ word. We can therefore say phonics is all about the study or, in our case, teaching and familiarising children with the sounds of English words. Come with me as we further differentiate some of these terminologies.
What is a phoneme? A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can differentiate meaning. For example, in the word pat, we can observe three distinct phonemes /p/ /a/ /t/. If we change /p/ /a/ /t/ to /m/ /a/ /t/, the meaning of the word will change absolutely. Therefore, this differentiation makes it imperative for children to be able to hear, learn and distinguish phonemes.
What is phonemic awareness? Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear and correctly use individual phonemes. It is the realisation that within a word are unique sounds or phonemes.
What different types of phonemes (sounds) in English do we have? English sounds are mainly divided into two groups; – Vowels, Consonants.
What are vowel sounds? A vowel sound is made without stopping the airflow from your vocal track or cavity. The most known vowel sounds are made by the letters a, e, i, o, u. Vowels are divided into short and long vowels. There are five letters (a, e, i, o, u & sometimes y for written English) that commonly represent vowels, but there are 20 vowel sounds for spoken English, and these 20 vowel sounds are divided into monophthongs and diphthongs. Don’t get worried; we will walk you through these in our program. Okay, let’s talk about consonants.
What are consonant sounds? Consonants are sounds made with a partial or total obstruction of air coming from your vocal track or cavity. They are represented by other letters except a, e, i, o, u. This means b, c, d, f, g, h and the rest. There are 24 consonant sounds in English.
This consonant and vowel business confuses me. Before you get it twisted, let me explain: There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. These 26 letters can be used to get the 44 sound systems in spoken English. Of these, 44 sounds are 20 vowel sounds and 24 consonant sounds. Note that the letter ‘y’ can make both a consonant and vowel sound. Also note that by playing around with these sounds, one can put two letters, for example, ‘c+h’ together to form a new sound …… which is used in words such as chips. This art of combining two letters to create one sound is called a digraph. Hence there are consonant and vowel digraphs.
Why do we teach English phonics/diction in Nigeria?
- Mother tongue interference:– The dialect of our different local languages common in our social circles often negatively influences our oral skills in the English language. An instance could be drawn from the three major tribes in Nigeria where a person of Hausa dialects would sound /f/ for /p/ fork for ‘pork’, fish for’ pish’; Efiks often sound Junction –for ‘yunsion’; Yorubas would replace shake with ‘sake.’ A typical Ibo man will sound /r/ for /l/ and /l/ for /r/ e.g. rice for ‘lice’ and clap for ‘crap.’
- To bring help to the intellectually disadvantaged pupils who struggle to read and pronounce words accurately: Good readers are phonemically aware; they understand the alphabetic principle and apply these skills rapidly and fluently. They possess strong vocabulary and syntactical and grammatical skills and relate reading to their own experiences.
- Poor foundations-: Several years of continuous decline in the general quality of Nigeria’s educational system, as well as teacher skills, training and instruments of teaching, has left the quality of English language learning at the nursery and primary school levels in an inferior state in comparison to global standards. As people grow older, the possibility of correcting wrong dictions becomes more difficult. For this reason, our programs are specifically targeted at early schoolers to provide them with the right foundations.
- Environmental influence, fear of criticism and shyness: – The normalization of informal English and the perception of proper English skills as being a show of elitism, often causes people not to frequently communicate in the right way. This causes a decline in the ability to speak correctly when required.