Scottish people- how is phonics taught in Scotland?

[Bigearringsbigsmile]

Following on from the shaun the sheep thread.
In England, we used to use Letters and Sounds and now schoold use a variety of different schemes. All have standard pronunciation of phonemes as part of the scheme. Letters and sounds had adjustments for regional variations like flat vowels. Bath, grass etc

I am really interested in learning how it taught in Scotland. Do you have different schemes to England? Are the phonemes different to allow for rhoticity?

Foot is more of a short oo to me, like 'futt'. Book has a long oo, as in 'You only get an oo with Typhoo.'

I'm from Central Scotland

Ha! I had an English boyfriend who was entranced by the way I said the oo sound. He used to beg me, between kisses, to reel off oo words. Moon, balloon, festoon ...

Well you questioned whether I was actually Scottish and corrected what I'd said (though actually agreeing with me). I was more confused that anything else! I'll leave it there.

Always surprises me as in the 90s, when she started writing, Julia Donaldson was living in the Glasgow suburbs as her DH worked at Glasgow uni. Her kids went to the same nursery as mine did, albeit a few years before. Although she herself and her DH had southern English accents, she would have been WELL aware of the way the locals spoke.

I have to read this while moving my lips. And I have the Waterboys singing whole of the moon as an earworm.
I'm practicing Shaun pronounced Shorn but not getting it really.

Aww! 🥰

When you say book and moon have the same oo- are you saying b-oo- k or m-u-n?

I'm curious about this as an English parent of a child educated in Scotland. Phonics definitely sounds different - DD learned year R phonics in England before switching to the Scottish system and for a while read with a clear local (Glasgow suburbs) accent while speaking with a mix of RP and old local accent. Now she's a fluent reader and has lost the "Scottish" accent in reading but retains it for singing and reciting poetry learned by ear. Normal speaking is now solidly RP with a hint of "north". I think there's a few more sight words at least in the scheme my kids' school uses...

I didn't learn phonics at school (too old) so I'm curious about how it works

That's fine but I think it was someone else who said "us northerners". Kind regards.

Do we?! My children haven’t been taught that - book and moon have completely different oo sounds

book and moon have completely different oo sounds

Every Scottish person I know would say book and moon with the same oo sound but English friends from the South would say book more as buck but moon with a longer sound.

It always amuses me that many English people omit the r sound in many words but add it unnecessarily in others eg drawring, lawr and order etc

Book and moon are very different oo sounds to me too. I think of book as having a medium-length clean u sound, whereas moon has the long ooo sound. I have jumbled linguistic influences though, so I'm not the best exemplar.

I worked with a teacher from London and it was a bit confusing with the jolly phonics scheme. The kids were Scottish. I'm Scottish. When we taught the "igh" sound for night, light, sight etc, she taught it as sounding sort of like "aye". But in Scotland that sound is different. I'm struggling to even think of a way to type it. It's a short sharp sound here. So she's saying "laaaiiight" and I'm saying "lite"

I cannot think of a better way to type this. Even approximating the sound as "aye" doesn't help because in Scotland a long "aye" (eye) sound means "yes", but a short "aye" (igh) sound means "always"

The kids don't care. They figure it out.

So, anyway... yes, jolly phonics satpin type stuff, but our accent is different so the sounds are different. It's not complicated.

We honestly don’t. Book is a shorter o or u sound, moon is a much longer oo or uu sound. There are some Scottish accents which would pronounce moon and book similarly but as there are many different accents and dialects up here it’s far from a standard pronunciation.

Out of interest @SirChenjins in which Scottish accents do book and moon have different sounds?

We lived in the US for 8 years - DD was 2 to 10 years old - and I taught her to read a few months before she started Kindergarten (so Reception age in England), using British resources, mostly Phonics Bug/Letters and Sounds, partly because I thought she’d get confused at school. Even though she went to pre-school, she still had an English accent at that stage. (Also US schools don’t teach phonics properly, in my view, eg they use a list of “sight words”, a mixture of decodable and non-decodable words, that someone came up with in the 1940s, including such commonly used words as ‘ax’.)

My kids loved Sesame Street, and sang along with an American accent.

They all have an oo sounds as in the one that's taught in phonics as oo (rather than the short oo with the eyes!). "Look at the book". In a Scottish accent, all oo sounds are this sound

(I'm Scottish but live down South and my children have tried and failed to teach me the short oo sound 🤣)

Oh no hang on, in England are look and book meant to be different? I remain confused by OO and 👀, clearly!

For my accent look, book, took, foot, hook all the same. A short u like sound.
Then moon, spoon, room, loom all have a longer sound, like coo.

Then cool, pool, are different again, half way between the two.

However some southern RP accents are different, listen to how Kirsty Allsop says room for example.

Door and floor have an "oh" sounds like Long O
Boot, foot , look etc have an "OO" sound as in Boo
This what I'd teach West of Scotland locally.

I remember reading Hairy MacLarey which are rhyming books to my daughters . The only one that ever caught me out was " paw" and " door" as they sounded nothing alike to us. We always laughed trying to rhyme them (NZ English )

They don’t sound alike to me either and I am from the north east of Scotland.
door rhymes with floor
paw rhymes with law

My dh sometimes has a zoom call with a lady in NZ. Phonics in New Zealand must be fascinating!