Question about my wording of 'beginning, middle and end'
Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2015 10:13 am
I received a very interesting question today and I was pleased to receive it.
David wasn't quite sure what was meant by the question, but I think it was not intended as a 'naive' question but a very deliberate question about 'precision'.
In my very earliest resources, I introduce the notion for the beginner of occurrence of sounds in spoken words related to the positions of the focus letter in printed words.
So, the object is to identify the occurrence of a specific sound /s/ in three spoken words and to then link that with the printed letter 's' in three example words: sun, nest, nuts
Then I focus on this identification as 'beginning, middle, end' of the words in broad terms rather than 'first, second, third, fourth' phonemes - because at this earliest stage, I made a judgement that this was OK to do.
In other words, the 'middle' sound is not literally 'the middle' in that there are four sounds in 'nest' so it is impossible to be precisely the 'middle' sound as the /s/ sound is actually the third sound of four sounds.
I intended the definition of 'middle', then, to be 'not at the beginning' and 'not at the end' but 'in between' the beginning and the end sound!
Ironically, this is just the kind of detail that I myself might pick up in other people's work so I'm impressed by the question!
Here is the original question:
debbie@phonicsinternational.com
David wasn't quite sure what was meant by the question, but I think it was not intended as a 'naive' question but a very deliberate question about 'precision'.
In my very earliest resources, I introduce the notion for the beginner of occurrence of sounds in spoken words related to the positions of the focus letter in printed words.
So, the object is to identify the occurrence of a specific sound /s/ in three spoken words and to then link that with the printed letter 's' in three example words: sun, nest, nuts
Then I focus on this identification as 'beginning, middle, end' of the words in broad terms rather than 'first, second, third, fourth' phonemes - because at this earliest stage, I made a judgement that this was OK to do.
In other words, the 'middle' sound is not literally 'the middle' in that there are four sounds in 'nest' so it is impossible to be precisely the 'middle' sound as the /s/ sound is actually the third sound of four sounds.
I intended the definition of 'middle', then, to be 'not at the beginning' and 'not at the end' but 'in between' the beginning and the end sound!
Ironically, this is just the kind of detail that I myself might pick up in other people's work so I'm impressed by the question!
Here is the original question:
I always welcome feedback, comments and findings - so please continue to send them to me at:Hi Debbie,
What's the answer to this:
"When can you hear the sound /s/ in these words?"
sun nest nuts
beginning? middle? end?
Thank you.
debbie@phonicsinternational.com