3 ms·
The danger here is that many of the patterns that go from letters -> syllables are completely messed up in English. (Come to think of it, the entire darned lang
by mabbo 7y ago
The danger here is that many of the patterns that go from letters -> syllables are completely messed up in English. (Come to think of it, the entire darned language can be like that).
I remember in grade 3 having a teacher give a lesson on syllables. We would clap along with each syllable in the word. She asked me to do this for "Fire". I clapped twice, as there is clearly an audible Fy-er" two syllables in Canadian English. She told me I was wrong, clapped once, and said "Fire" quickly. She "knew" that a word with "consonant - vowel - consonant - vowel" pattern makes a single syllable. Never mind that my ears, and the rest of the students' ears, can hear that she's wrong.
The end result was her confusing the class about what syllables are. I remember the lesson well, because what I really learned was that teachers mean well but aren't always right.
- scotty79 7y agoI don't mean syllables as in precise definition (they are kind of fuzzy as your expeirience shows) or especially not counting them or learning which you should put the accent on. I'm talking about the fact that if you know how fi-(i)re sounds, you can guess how hi-(i)re sounds or even ty-(y)re or de-si-(i)re.
- dqv 7y agoThat's more or less what phonics is. It's discussed in the article. There's a combination of learning how sounds map to letters/letter combinations and then learning how they are used in real words (with spelling tests). The teacher shows the letter combinations first and the students sound them out. Then the reverse happens: the teacher sounds out the letters and the students have to write down every letter combination that corresponds with that sound. Then there is a spelling test that uses the sounds with a lot of edge cases where patterns/guessing won't work. They would also have students read aloud to make sure they were moving along smoothly.