What's a Schwa Sound Anyway? : A Holistic Guide to Phonetics, Phonics, and Spelling

by Wilde, Sandra

• ISBN13: 9780435088651
• ISBN10: 0435088653
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-04-21
• Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books

Summary

In What's a Schwa Sound Anyway? Sandra Wilde answers many questions related to phonics and its relationship to learning to read and spell.

Author Biography

SANDRA WILDE, Ph.D., is widely recognized for her expertise in developmental spelling and her advocacy of holistic approaches to spelling and phonics. She is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Portland State University in Oregon. She is best known for her work in invented spelling, phonics and miscue analysis. She specializes in showing teachers how kids' invented spellings and miscues can help us work with them in more sophisticated and learner-centered ways. Looking at what kids do as they read and write is at the heart of Sandra's presentations and workshops. She can do lively keynote presentations that highlight the interesting things that we can learn by paying close attention to students' invented spellings and miscues, as well as workshops of varying lengths that focus on student-centered teaching of spelling and phonics. She has recently begun offering workshops that focus on understanding students' miscues as a guide to appropriate instruction, p

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi	(2)
Introduction	xiii
Part One	1	(54)
1 The Sounds of English	3	(20)
How Much Do Teachers Need to Know About Linguistics?	3	(2)
What's the Difference Between Phonetics, Phonics, and Spelling?	5	(1)
What's a Phoneme?	6	(1)
Why Bother with Those Hard-to-Read Phonetic Symbols?	7	(1)
What's the Difference Between a Vowel and a Consonant?	7	(1)
What Are the Consonant Sounds of English?	8	(8)
Stops	8	(3)
Fricatives	11	(2)
Affricates	13	(1)
Nasals	13	(2)
Liquids and Glides	15	(1)
What Are the Vowel Sounds of English?	16	(4)
Sidebar: What's the Difference Between Diphthongs, Digraphs, and Blends?	20	(1)
Why Does the Same Sound Not Always Sound the Same?	20	(3)
2 Phonics Rules	23	(9)
Which Rules Are Too Easy?	24	(2)
Which Rules Are Just Right?	26	(3)
Single-Letter Vowels	26	(1)
Two-Letter Vowels	27	(1)
Consonants	28	(1)
Which Rules Are Too Hard or Too Useless?	29	(3)
Sidebar: What About Syllabication? (Or Is It Syllabification?) Does It Help Kids Read Better?	31	(1)
3 Spelling Rules	32	(6)
Which Sounds Have a Default Spelling?	33	(1)
Which Sounds Have Variant Spellings?	34	(1)
Which Spellings Are Influenced by Orthographic Patterns?	35	(2)
Sidebar: Why Does Our Spelling System Seem So Illogical?	36	(1)
Where Do Spelling Rules Fit into the Bigger Picture of Learning How to Spell?	37
4 The Speakers of English: Issues of Language Variation	38	(17)
Why Do Speakers of English Sound So Different from One Another?	39	(1)
Are Language Differences Just Geographic?	40	(5)
Sidebar: What's a Dialect, What's an Accent, and Who Has Them?	41	(2)
Sidebar: What Do Black English Speakers Do Differently?	43	(2)
Are Some Versions of English Better than Others?	45	(2)
Sidebar: Is Language Variation Governed by Rules?	46	(1)
If People Talk Differently, Will It Affect Their Reading and Spelling?	47	(4)
Sidebar: Aren't Many Spelling Problems Caused by Mispronouncing Words?	50	(1)
Why Do Some African Americans Say Aks for Ask?	51	(4)
Part Two	55	(84)
5 Skills and the Big Phonics Debate: A Whole Language, Commonsense Perspective	57	(26)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Skills	58	(4)
Knowledge and Strategies for Word Recognition in Reading	62	(12)
Beginning Reading	63	(3)
Sidebar: Phonemic Awareness	66	(1)
How to Figure Out Unfamiliar Words	67	(5)
Sidebar: Research Support for Not Teaching Phonics	72	(2)
Spelling Knowledge and Strategies	74	(6)
Sidebar: Spelling Camp	77	(1)
Spelling Strategies	78	(2)
Reading and Spelling Without "Skills"	80	(3)
6 What Does Invented Spelling Tell Us About Kids' Knowledge of Phonics? (And What Should We Do About It?)	83	(42)
Very Young Writers	84	(4)
Words Run Together with No Spaces	84	(2)
Mirror Writing	86	(2)
Learning to Represent Sounds	88	(10)
Letter-Name Spellings	88	(3)
Leaving Out n's	91	(2)
Problems with Digraphs	93	(2)
Spelling the Way You Talk	95	(3)
Higher-Level Features in Spelling	98	(11)
Word Boundaries in Older Children	98	(3)
Unusual Spellings	101	(4)
Substituting One Sound for Another	105	(1)
Problems in Spelling a Particular Sound	106	(1)
Phonetic and Visual Spellings as Kids Get Older	107	(2)
Specific Spelling Features in Older Writers	109	(8)
Spelling /s/ and /k/	110	(1)
Double Consonants	111	(2)
Suffixes	113	(1)
Homophones	114	(3)
Fine-Tuning	117	(7)
Easy Words Spelled Wrong	117	(2)
Missing Letters	119	(2)
Sticking in Apostrophes	121	(2)
My Daughter's in Sixth Grade and Her Spelling's Still Terrible; What Should I Do?	123	(1)
A Final Word on Working with Invented Spelling	124	(1)
7 Miscues: What They Tell Us About Children's Use of Phonics When They Read	125	(14)
Miscues with Low Graphic Similarity	128	(2)
Insertion, Semantically Acceptable	128	(1)
Some Graphic Similarity, Minimal Meaning Change	128	(1)
Some Graphic Similarity, Corrected	129	(1)
Some Graphic Similarity, Correction Attempted	129	(1)
Miscues with High Graphic Similarity	130	(5)
High Graphic Similarity, Semantically Acceptable	130	(1)
High Graphic Similarity, Semantically Acceptable	131	(1)
High Graphic Similarity, Semantically Acceptable, Corrected	131	(1)
High Graphic Similarity, Syntactically and Semantically Unacceptable, Slight Meaning Change	131	(1)
High Graphic Similarity, Syntactically and Semantically Unacceptable	132	(1)
High Graphic Similarity, Known Word, Nonword Produced	132	(1)
High Graphic Similarity, Unknown Word, Nonword Produced	133	(1)
High Graphic Similarity, Known Word, Nonword Produced	133	(2)
What This All Means--for Miranda, for Readers, and for Teachers	135	(4)
Epilogue: Where Do I Go from Here?	139	(2)
Appendix: Phonetic Symbols Used in This Book	141	(4)
References	145