One of the challenges with vowel sounds is that they can’t exactly be “felt” in the mouth. Most kids actually pick up consonant pronunciations much more quickly. Nevertheless, phonics teaching materials and testing in schools still often hang on to the traditional approach, so an ESL teacher in the public schools should be able to manage both systems.It’s not uncommon for children to struggle with vowels. The main reason for dropping the traditional way of calling a vowel sound "the long a sound" or "the long e sound" is that in present day English, these vowels are not pronounced for a longer amount of time than other vowels, and calling them "long" gives the wrong information, and perhaps the wrong idea, on pronunciation to NNSEs. The traditional ways are beginning to be replaced (for example, in the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program for Reading, Spelling, and Speech), but the traditional terminology is still prevalent. (We're talking descriptions that hark back to the Middle English variety of English from around 1400 C.E.). NSEs who are elementary teachers may find it hardest to throw out the traditional way of referring to vowels, which is based on long outmoded historical descriptions of English. Some other IPA vowel symbols are unusual. The IPA symbols associated with many of the vowel speech sounds are already familiar symbols for native speakers of English (e.g., /i/, /e/, /o/, /u/), but they may be used to represent different sounds from what they represent in a traditional approach. Activity: Relating Technical Names to Traditional Names
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