by Anthea Fraser Gupta (School of English, University of Leeds, a.f.gupta@leeds.ac.uk) for the Committee for Linguistics in Education.
As part of the National Literacy Strategy, teachers in the UK are being encouraged to make more use of phonics. It is suggested that they should draw children's attention to the relationshop between sounds and spellings in English, thus helping them to work out how to pronounce words they see in writing that they do not recognise, and how to produce a phonetically sensible spelling of a word they want to write.
From this site you can download an introduction to the relationship between sounds and spelling (below) written by linguists for teachers, and some suggestions about where to begin teaching this. Are you teaching in Manchester? We have information about Phoneme-grapheme correspondences and a Manchester accent .
The introduction refers to work by John Wells -- you can find out more about some of the accents of English from his web page links.
We use standard phonetic symbols, like those found in many good dictionaries. English spelling is not based on any particular modern accent -- whatever their accents your pupils can learn sound-spelling correspondences. Our introduction takes account of the differences in the accents of the UK that you are likely to encounter
We hope you find this material useful.
The text was created in Word 2000, but has been saved to some other formats. If you are reading it in Word 6 or 2000 everything should be fine, including the phonetics. But some of the other formats may have some problems.
The embedded font used in Word is use an embedded
True Type fonts from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, downloadable from
<www.sil.org>. You should also be able
to read the phonetics if you are using the massive Arial Unicode, which is
downloadable from Microsoft. Many phonetic symbols are ordinary letters
from the Roman alphabet. In this document I use seven phonetic symbols which
are not in the normal alphabet. They are:
/
S/ /
tS/
/
dZ/ /
T/ /
D/ /
N/
/
ã
/
/S/ /tS/ /dZ/ /T/ /D/ /N/ /ä/
If the symbols you see in the top row above are identical to those in the lower row, you are not able to see the correct symbols.
| Word 2000 | Word 6 | html |
This issue of Phonics and Accents of English was discussed at thespring meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Leeds, April 2001: a summary is available, and the full text of Wells's presentation.