Is O for onion?

[Shadow666]

A discussion at work.

The context is an alphabet book for young learners learning the alphabet. It says O is for onion. It then has writing practice for Oo and an octopus to colour in. I thought it was odd, but next week we are doing "u is for uniform".

Is it just me who thinks they should stick to things that work phonetically or am I wrong here?

Phonics aren't the be all and end all. It's helpful for English learners to understand that not everything is as it seems with a lot of English words. If the book only had one example of an "o" word, then Octopus. But if there's multiple examples then including a word like onion seems sensible to me, because that gives the opportunity to say "well it sounds a bit different but it still starts with this letter".

But it's not helpful in terms of teaching phonics in steps. It's fine to include O later as an alternative spelling of the sound /u/ but it's confusing to teach it to begin with.

Alternative spellings are the very last stage of phonics to teach. This is often unpopular or misunderstood because it means that DC will tend to spell phonetically (ie, incorrectly) for a long time, but it leads to more success with both reading (short term and long term) and spelling (long term).

Phonetic notation is when you see the International Alphabet used as a visual representation of phones (sounds in speech)

Phonemic??

@ferrier

No.

Phonemics is the study of the distribution of sound systems in human languages.

Phonetics is the physologcal study of speech sounds. It disregards patterns.

My colleague coined the phrase

"there is such a thing as "the phone [p]", because phones are defined universally, but that there is no such thing as "the phoneme /p/" as phonemes are relative to languages. "

Labelled as phonemic chart on most ESL resources eg. www.eslbase.com/tefl-a-z/phonemic-chart