English Phonics Chart Programme Guide - THRASS

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SPELLING THE 500 BASEWORDS: The ‘500-IN-LISTS’ side of the Green 500 Chart has the 500 basewords in 49 spelling lists. Encourage your learners to use the ‘Say, NAME, Cover, Write, Check’ spelling procedure to spell all the words, starting with List 1. Learning to spell some of the Hotwords (or Keywords) can begin at any time (even pre-school with the help of a school-age brother or sister). 1. SAY the word. 2. NAME the letters. Encourage your learners to repeatedly say the word and to ‘Overwrite & Name’ (or form in the air and name) only the letters that they cannot visualise or the letters over which they hesitate. They should be encouraged to do this until they can say the word and name ALL the letters with clarity and confidence. If a letter is part of a 2- letter, 3-letter or 4-letter spelling, they should be encouraged to overwrite and name all the letters in it, to help them recognise it in other words. Learners should also be encouraged to identify the spellings in the onsets (consonants at the start of syllables e.g. skill) and rimes (vowel and any consonants at the end of syllables e.g. skill), and to overwrite and name the letters in them (if only in their mind’s eye) to help remember them for other words (e.g. sky, skirt, skull, and chill, drill, thrill). The ‘500-IN-ONE-LIST’ side is good for explaining the onsets and rimes in syllables, given that the consonant and vowels spellings are in blue and red. 3. COVER the word. 4. WRITE the word. 5. CHECK the letters. For the actual Spelling Test, the teacher (or ‘The Teacher’) can say the word aloud for the learners to repeat and write. When appropriate, learners can prepare for more than one list at a time. For older learners, when learning a new list of words, it is best to first say the words aloud for them to write the spellings in a ‘Have a Go Book’. They can then examine their spellings, ideally with the help of a partner, to determine which are the ‘Best Letters’ to practise visualising prior to the actual spelling test (especially if the letters form part of a keyspelling or non-keyspelling). These words can then be written in a ‘Spelling Logbook’ (a plain or lined exercise book) and the ‘Best Letters’ traced over using ‘Overwrite & Name’, using a pencil and/or highlighter pen so that the letters stand out from the word (as the keyspellings do in the EP Chart). Ideally, this should be using a print script and not using joined letters - though these can be used later, once the word can be visualised and spelled without hesitation. The logbook can be dated at the start of each new week and these ‘Best Letters’ can be discussed with other learners, the teacher/tutor and/or parent (for the learners who are not adults!) before the test or as revision or to celebrate the progress made with the basewords, Group Words and/or class-generated lists of Topic Words, Subject Words, Rhyming Words and/or School Outing Words (learned before the trip!). Watch Out! People may sometimes disagree or be inconsistent as to which letters represent which sounds. It often depends on how the word is pronounced. For example, it could be argued that the word ‘really’ can be said with two or three vowels e.g. r-ea-ll-y or r-e-a-ll-y (with the ‘e’ ‘a’ being only SBN 31 or 31 and 32). Also, it seems sensible to think that the ‘e’ ‘s’ in c l o th es represents /z/ and yet, perhaps, it is only the ‘s’ in d oe s and not the ‘e’ ‘s’? c ou gh or c o ugh? C ou gh, is probably preferable because ‘o’ ‘u’ and ‘g’ ‘h’ are used as digraphs in other words (e.g. house, group, touch and ghost, laugh) so this segmentation seems the most sensible. c a ge or c a g e? i ce or i c e? n o se or n o s e? The first alternative in each case is probably preferable. Learners often write these words as ‘caj’, ‘is’ and ‘noz’. It is preferable to underline the ‘j’ and write ‘ge’ above it, underline the ‘s’ and put ‘ce’ above it and underline the ‘z’ and put ‘se’ above it, to let the learner know which letters to ‘Overwrite & Name’ in their logbook (and find in the EP Chart!). Sometimes letters are used for abbreviations, such as in Dr, Mr, Mrs, Ms and St, and sometimes for more than one sound, such as the ‘x’ in box (where the ‘x’ represents two sounds, the consonant blend /ks/) and the ‘u’ in music (where the ‘u’ represents the consonant sound at the start of “yawn” and the vowel sound in the middle of “moon”), where there is no sensible relationship between the letters and sounds. The ‘d’ ‘n’ ‘e’ ‘s’ in ‘Wednesday’ is not a 4-letter spelling, as the four letters represent two sounds, so there is no sensible relationship between the letters and the sounds. In these cases, it is best to learn the letters by sight, as if they were a sequence of players or dancers on a stage, by saying the word and then naming all the letters. The letters can still be the ‘Best Letters’ but they do not represent a keyspelling or spelling. In the ‘500-IN-ONE-LIST’ side, letters with more than one sound are black. These letters are ‘NPS’ - “Not Playing Sensibly” or you can use the term Non-Phonographic Spelling. THE 44 SOUNDS: It’s a good idea to refer to one of the S-51, S-55, S-56 or S-69 charts, as you read through this paragraph. The sound-box numbers (SBN) are shown in S-62, S-01 and S-12. Fifteen of the 24 consonant sounds, represented by the blue keyspellings in SBN1 (bird), 4 (dog), 6 (gate), 8 (jam), 9 (leg), 10 (mouse), 11 (net), 12 (king), 14 (rain), 16 (treasure), 20 (feather), 21 (voice), 22 (wheel), 23 (yawn) and 24 (zip), are “voiced” (i.e. they vibrate the vocal cords). The other nine, represented by the blue keyspellings in SBN2 (cat), 3 (chair), 5 (fish), 7 (hand), 13 (panda), 15 (sun), 17 (shark), 18 (tap) and 19 (thumb) are “unvoiced” (i.e. they do not vibrate the vocal cords). All 20 vowel sounds, represented by the red keyspellings in SBN25-44, are “voiced” and are in two groups “short vowels” and “long vowels”. There are seven short vowels (7SV), represented by the red keyspellings in SBN25 (ant), 29 (bed), 32 (teacher), 34 (tin), 36 (frog), 39 (book) and 44 (bus). When you say the short vowels, your tongue stays still and the sound is short. These sounds are the 7 short monophthongs of English. There are thirteen long vowels (13LV), represented by the bold keyspellings in SBN26 (baby), 27 (hair), 28 (car), 30 (me), 31 (ear), 33 (shirt), 35 (tiger), 37 (nose), 38 (coin), 40 (moon), 41 (moor), 42 (fork) and 43 (cow). When you say the long vowels for SBN28 (car), 30 (me), 33 (shirt), 40 (moon) and 42 (fork), your tongue stays still and the sound is long. These sounds are the 5 long monophthongs of English. When you say the long vowels for SBN26 (baby), 27 (hair), 31 (ear), 35 (tiger), 37 (nose), 38 (coin), 41 (moor) and 43 (cow), the sound is still long but your tongue moves, making it sound and feel as if there are two sounds when it counts as only one. These are the eight diphthongs (8D) of English. Note that “the THRASS way” for pronouncing the double ’o’ ’r’ in moor is “oo-er” (as spoken widely in Northern England and by many others in the first syllable of ‘rural’). This gives the diphthong a sound-box (a home) so learners can discuss the different pronunciations for such words as moor, poor, sure, pour and tour etc (with ‘moor’ being the least abstract and, therefore, the keyword). When learners spell the word ‘ear’ as ‘eyer’ (SBN31) and ‘my’ as ‘miy’ (SBN35) it shows that they can hear the two parts of the diphthong but they need to learn that each counts as only one sound. You should clap your hands only once to represent the vowel sounds in these words - even though many might think that you should be clapping your hands twice, as if the words were polysyllables (explained in the Group 4 Skills). There are slight differences in the way that people say the sounds, depending on how they use their organs of speech (i.e. lips, teeth, tongue, palate and vocal cords) and the sound that is pronounced immediately before and/or after a sound. Nevertheless, it is best to teach your learners that there are 44 pure forms but, in truth, each sound has weaker variations (allophones). For example, the sound /t/, for the letter ‘t’ at the start of ‘tap’, is much stronger than the /t/, for the letter ‘t’ in ‘city’. Therefore, when locating a sound-box on the EP Charts (e.g. the sound /t/), remember that the pronunciation of the sound in a particular word may actually be a variation of the pure form so you are really looking for the “Best Fit Box”! To make sense of the EP Chart Programme, it is best to first learn the keywords and their sounds “the THRASS way”. Then, when looking for the Best Fit Box for a sound in a keyword, especially if a different sound is being used because of accent, the best fit will simply be a different sound-box. For example, if the second ‘a’ in banana is pronounced with the short vowel heard at the start of “ant” then the Best Fit Box will be SBN25 in V1, rather than with S-63 ENGLISH PHONICS CHART PROGRAMME GUIDE © 2012 ALAN DAVIES V1305ZW PRINTED BY, AND WITH THE PERMISSION OF, BIDVEST PAPERPLUS PTY LTD, SOUTH AFRICA 6
the long vowel in SBN28 (which is “the THRASS way”). Please note that, for most people, the letter ‘r’ in the red vowel keyspellings in hair, square, car, ear, deer, teacher, collar, doctor, measure, fern, shirt, worm, fur, moor, fork and door is not pronounced with the sound /r/. The tongue does not curl back on itself, as it does when you say /r/ for the keyspellings in rain, cherry and wrist. For some speakers, such as those with American, Irish or Scottish accents, where there is some movement towards /r/ in pronouncing the vowel keyspellings above, it is still best to consider their pronunciations as variations (allophones) of the same sound and, therefore, “the THRASS way” is still the Best Fit Box. That is, the letter ‘r’ in ‘shark’ is part of the 2-letter vowel digraph ‘a’ ‘r’. It is only for very broad accents that the ‘a’ would be with ‘ant’ (SBN25) or ‘banana’ (SBN28) and the ‘r’ would be with ‘rain’, resulting in the letters ‘r’ ‘k’ being a consonant cluster for the consonant blend /rk/ (as in sh-a-r-k). “Give me a word with the sound /r/?” For most people, the words hair to door (above) would not be good answers but rain, cherry and wrist would be! THE “QUIET VOWEL”: The short /er/ vowel (SBN32) can be heard at the beginning, middle and/or end of many polysyllabic words e.g. teacher, collar, doctor, measure, zebra, garden, fossil, lion, circus, about, across, again, ago, o’clock, upon, another, banana, litre, Saturday, sulphur, camera, chocolate. It is not so easy to hear in some syllables e.g. ki-tten, gar-den, fo-ssil and circus. However, you can prove that it must be there because you clap your hands twice for two vowel sounds (e.g. kitten not kittn). The learner who spells kitten as kittun or kittern is able to hear the short /er/ even though it is a weak variation (allophone) of the pure form. They now just need to visualise the right spelling. If schools use the ‘Spelling Log’ idea, the short /er/ is often the cause of the problem. This is because: (1) it has so many different spellings; (2) it is often hidden in the middle of syllables (making it very hard to hear); and (3) sometimes it is so quiet that people don’t even bother saying it, such as in ‘camra’, ‘choclate’, ‘gardner’, ‘intrest’, ‘seprate’, ‘stationry’, ‘Arsnal’, ‘Margret’ and so on. It also causes problems for reading too, with learners stressing the vowel so that they pronounce the ‘e’ in kitten as if it was in ‘bed’ and the ‘o’ ‘r’ in doctor as if it was in ‘fork’. WORDS ENDING IN ‘L’ ‘E’: Most people agree that the words: final, medal, petal; April, pencil, pupil; carol, petrol, symbol; angel, camel, label; awful, harmful and painful are all polysyllabic and we clap our hands twice to represent the two vowel sounds. However, many learners do not hear the second vowel, the “Quiet Vowel” (the unstressed vowel), and they spell these words as monosyllables - finl, medl, petl, Aprl, pencl, pupl, carl, petrl, symbl, angl, caml, labl, awfl, harmfl and painfl and so on. For words like ankle, apple, bottle, kettle and table, we would expect to spell these words as ankel, appel, bottel and tabel, as we do in the words ‘angel, camel and label’ above. However, the expected letter arrangement 'e' 'l' is actually written as 'l' 'e' (the last two letters have swapped places!), so by analysis the short /er/ vowel is represented by the 'l' and the consonant sound /l/ is represented by the 'e'. Therefore, the 'l' and ‘e’ should be regarded as ‘catch-alls’. However, instead of spelling these words by focusing on the individual sounds, it is probably best to treat the last two sounds as a unit, as a rime (vowel and any consonants at the end of syllable e.g. skill). That is, “The TWO SOUNDS /er/ /l/ can be spelled as ‘al’, ‘el’, ‘il’, ‘ol’, ‘ul’ and ‘le’!”. Alternatively, learners can learn to spell these words by focusing on syllables e.g. gra-vel, le-vel, no-vel, sho-vel, swi-vel, tra-vel and so on. The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary has masses of rhyming words so, if you think it is a good idea, you or your learners can create a word list containing the same rhyme (where the endings sound the same) or rime (where the endings sound and look the same). In the basewords fire, our and hour, the vowel sounds are triphthongs (with an additional movement of the tongue) and each word should be treated as a monosyllable (with one hand clap). However, your learners might think that these words are polysyllables, with TWO vowel sounds e.g. f-i-re (h-i-re, w-i-re, t-y-re), ou-r and hou-r, and this is also acceptable. This is because there are no sound-boxes in the EP Chart for the English triphthongs, as these were found to be unnecessary following trials in 1992-94. THE FIRST FOCUS SHOULD BE ON THE MEANING OF WORDS: There is wide disagreement as to how schoolchildren should be taught to read and spell. We believe that it all starts before formal schooling with parents, grandparents, childminders and nursery teachers talking to babies, toddlers and young children about the pictures, photographs, words, phrases, sentences and stories in favourite books. It is extremely important to first develop speaking and listening skills, vocabulary, knowledge about the structure of phrases and sentences, knowledge of the world and how it works, and a love of reading - through looking at, discussing and enjoying the contents of books. It is not a good idea for schools to use a ‘Phonics-First’ (Synthetic Phonics) approach, where children are first taught that each lower-case letter represents only one sound and they are only shown words that can be read through using these sounds, often in contrived sentences. Using this method, children are not able to read 81 of the 100 Hotwords, that is, 81% of the ‘see-a-lot’ words of English. A Phonics-First approach results in fewer parents sharing books with their young children and causes many children to take longer to read and/or spell than they should do or, even worse, to have reading and/or spelling difficulties that they would otherwise not have had. When reading the many basewords of English that contain 2-letter, 3-letter and 4-letter spellings and 1-letter spellings that do not make the sound that they have been taught, they persist with the flawed strategy of giving each letter one sound (often with the short vowel /er/ added at the end, so that they are actually saying two sounds and syllables, as in f-er, k-er, m-er, n-er, s-er, t-er and so on) with the result that they cannot read these words. When spelling, they continue (even as adults) to use mostly 1-letter spellings to represent the sounds that they hear, with the result that they are not able to spell many of the simplest of words e.g. sed, woz, becos, skool and, later, mosk, fisics, teknology etc. They often use capital letters in words to represent the long vowel sounds that they have still not yet been taught (e.g. ‘wAt’ for wait. ‘mEt’ for meet, ‘rIt’ for right, ‘rOd’ for road, ‘fRm’ for farm etc), having only been taught that there are five not 20 vowel sounds. They often do not use the names of letters when spelling aloud (as is normal) but instead use poorly-articulated sounds (with ‘cat’ being “ker-a-ter” instead of “See-Ay-Tee”). Learning to read and spell does not begin with the Synthetic Phonics approach to reading but with parents discussing and enjoying the contents of books with their pre-school children - doing their bit to build the foundations for essential speaking, listening, reading and spelling skills and a love of reading. Young schoolchildren should be encouraged, by parents, teachers and older schoolchildren (Reader Leaders), to turn over the pages of books, especially favourite books, to read and re-read the stories, so that they learn to read more and more words by sight. When reading new or unfamiliar sentences, they should be encouraged to point at and discuss the important words and to ‘Have a good go’ at repeating the sentence, while sliding a finger under the words as they say them. If they are unable to read a word, they should be told what it says or encouraged to work it out by using one of the four searchlights explained on the back cover of the EP Book. Having a good understanding of phonics is important. However, the first focus should be on the meaning of words. PERMISSION IS GIVEN FOR THIS GUIDE (VERSION V1305ZW) TO BE COPIED AND REPRODUCED BUT NOT ADAPTED. THRASS UK LTD, THE WILLOWS, 18 LONG LANE, UPTON, CHESTER. CH2 2PD, ENGLAND, +44 1244 323079. THRASS UK IS LICENSED TO SERVE CUSTOMERS IN EUROPE, AFRICA*, THE MIDDLE EAST, SOUTH AMERICA, CENTRAL AMERICA AND USA EXCLUDING SOUTH AFRICA, LESOTHO, SWAZILAND, BOTSWANA AND NAMIBIA, WHICH SINCE 2011 HAVE BEEN OVERSEEN BY BIDVEST PAPERPLUS PTY LTD SOUTHERN AFRICA (ZA, LS, SZ, BW, NA) Contact SSC Pretoria thrass@silveray.co.za +27 (0)12 523 1000 ZIMBABWE (ZW) World Links Zimbabwe Eliada Gudza eliada@ world-links-sar.co.zw +263 (0)772 239 534 S-63 ENGLISH PHONICS CHART PROGRAMME GUIDE © 2012 ALAN DAVIES V1305ZW PRINTED BY, AND WITH THE PERMISSION OF, BIDVEST PAPERPLUS PTY LTD, SOUTH AFRICA 7
Page 1 and 2: PERMISSION IS GIVEN FOR THIS DOCUME
Page 3 and 4: Guidance Notes for TEACHING THE ‘
Page 5: 2-letter spelling, the digraph, ‘

English Phonics Chart Programme Guide - THRASS

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