‘He want aloud’

[ProfessorofDarkArts]

On a FB thread about schools and rules during the heat. Honestly I give up 🤦🏻‍♀️

It’s confusing if you haven’t thought about how ar sounds in different accents. Many won’t have heard the terms rhotic or non-rhotic before, even though they’ll have heard people using the accents of course. And many people won’t have heard of IPA either.

Only because the MNers who get confused refuse to recognise that the 'ar' phonic is the sound you get in the first a in Lana

Again, there is more than one way the ar sound is taught 😅

It is taught differently in Ireland as I’ve mentioned already, as well as in America. (I googled American phonics and ar is very different to an English ar, and it’s somewhat different to an Irish ar too.)

I’m not sure how ar is taught in places like Scotland, but if an English ar sound is taught to children who speak with a rhotic accent, that could explain why they find things more difficult. You mentioned upthread that they do iirc.

Scarf and giraffe don't rhyme for the children I taught although they do rhyme for me. The 'ar' phoneme is taught separately from 'a' whichever way you pronounce it.

I've never encountered children in Scotland having difficulties with phonics

@Daradillington It’s confusing if you haven’t thought about how ar sounds in different accents. Many won’t have heard the terms rhotic or non-rhotic before, even though they’ll have heard people using the accents of course. And many people won’t have heard of IPA either.
How hard is it to look up the meaning or ask what it means? Is it so difficult to type 'rhotic meaning' into a search engine?

Instead we get the 'Why are you saying Larna when there's no R in Lana?'.

@CaptainMyCaptain , they don't rhyme for me. Scarf is the 'RP' version and giraffe rhymes with laff. I can appreciate that the 'RP' version is gir-arf (the letter r isn't said).

I am dyslexic, I find it really insulting when people, who usually have no experience of dyslexia, use it as an excuse for ignorance. Yes I make mistakes, yes I often read things incorrectly but there is a difference between mistakes and not knowing standard English.

I posted a while back that I read a thread title and thought someone was trying to choose between a dog and a slow cooker.

Dyslexia can be funny.

Neither have I.

I think the most difficult thing in phonics was for my children was distinguishing between th and f.

My first thought was that the 'want aloud' writer was northern.

Down south, I was always amused by some local graffiti saying something or other was 'ballshit'.

It really stems from people communicating in the written form when years ago they didn't do so very often so these errors wouldn't be so obvious.

I've always been a bookworm but have still learned a lot about grammar online in the last 25 years.

How hard is it to look up the meaning or ask what it means? Is it so difficult to type 'rhotic meaning' into a search engine?
Instead we get the 'Why are you saying Larna when there's no R in Lana?'.

@PleasantPedant
Well, I very much agree with you about looking things up before posting. It’s not an issue confined to ‘ar’ on MN though.

Also, though I appreciate you do add extra detail, most people on MN don’t add ‘as said in a non-rhotic accent’ when spelling words phonetically with an ar.

I’m not sure what parts of the UK @PleasantPedant meant when she said:
‘In some parts of the UK with rhotic accents, the children don't learn phonics as easily as those in areas where the accent is nearer to RP’.
It may not have been Scotland.

I remember kids writing "I were" instead of "I was" because that was the dialect.

Surely you wouldn't expect reception kids to get it right though? It would be great if they can write anything much at age 4/5.

Currently feeling aggravated by a post on Facebook that I saw a couple of days ago, that says 'Are buddleeah bushes are groing so big now. Butterflys love them. I don't no what theyd do without them.'

Grown woman in her late 50s. Has 3 daughters between 31 and 41 who have the same kind of bad spelling and grammar. I get that some people can't help it, but it's so annoying! FFS, how can anyone get to their 30s, 40s, 50s, and not know it's our bushes, (not ARE bushes,) that the word 'growing' has a W in it, the plural of butterfly is butterflies, and it's KNOW not no when you say you don't know something! FFS!

.

Tbh although a lot of posts here seem to despair about the poor standards of teaching these days I am always far more inclined to think it’s people over the age of 30 who make these blunders

Want aloud would be 100% how half my school would write wasn’t allowed. I’m 45.

And yet you've written that in modern English. Not even a whiff of Shakespeare let alone anything more archaic.

Yes, it doesn't seem to be younger people/teens/children making these errors. As you say it's pretty much people who are 30+.

It was Scotland and Wales.
Not the links I was thinking about but might provide some insight
'Clear guidance' call on teaching reading in class in Wales - BBC News
Thousands Of Children In Wales Struggle To Read - Kidseducationfranchise.com

I think a lot of the problem arises from predictive text; the past participle seems to be fast disappearing.
On a MN thread today, I have read 'they were bias', no they were biased, there are plenty of other examples but that one particularly grates on me for some reason.
'Apposed' instead of 'opposed' also jars, along with 'air on the side of caution', rather than 'err', part of the problem is that people don't actually think of the meaning of what they are saying, hence 'tow the line' for 'toe the (starting) line'.

'I am bias' is a pet hate of mine. I'm amazed at how shocking the standard of the English on SM is. Rediculous!

What do they think rediculous means? It's not even a correction of a mistyped word in the way that defiantly is.

Interestingly I remember this from my schools days. I’m 50’s, my younger sister is about 45 now.

i was taught grammar. Spelling tests. Dates. Rules.

my sister the teaching methods were changed and the focus was on creativity and encouragement. So if a kid wrote an imaginative essay they’d get top marks and a well done! I’d read it and think wtf- no correction of spelling or grammar in the slightest. Apparently it put children off learning if you were negative about their efforts.

so that would explain that to an extent. And also the resistance to correction…

I work with a lot of dyslexic people and it gets easy to spot the written patterns. It’s hard to describe but it’s rarely spag that gives it away, there’s a certain logic to the way the write that demonstrates how their brain interprets.

I know a few dyslexic people too. I've not taught them but agree about the patterns. It's not 'poor spelling'.
The people I mean are very intelligent but their writing looks like gobbledegook at first and the writing looks like a child's.

I don't know much about dyslexia other than it is obvious that these people have it.

I’m not sure. I think my children’s grammar and spelling is poorer than mine unfortunately. They are in their teens now. I think the difference is that I was an avid reader as a child, while they spend more time on computer games and SM now too.

One of them is dyslexic and autistic and found phonics extremely confusing as a young child. He is a Gestalt language processor, but I only heard about that type of language acquisition process more recently, not while he was trying and failing at school.

They just start an argument about RP being for stuck up people and that their accent is just as valid, and IPA is too complicated, and they haven't the time. It would have probably been quicker for them to look it up than argue.

I do use RP or tone down my accent in the workplace because if I use my own accent, people sometimes struggle with the vowels. English may be their third or fourth language.

I accept the IPA versions because it's a standard version.
If I say 'parth' ([pɑːθ]) it might be because it avoids me being asked what i mean by 'path' ([paθ]).

For those with rhotic accents, it can be genuinely confusing to see path written as parth the first time you see it. Rhotic accents are just as valid.

I agree that people can learn to understand what people mean by using ar to spell a word phonetically. I was confused when I first saw people using it on MN, but it’s fine now. I guess there will always be people coming across it for the first time though.

For those with rhotic accents, it can be genuinely confusing to see path written as parth the first time you see it. Rhotic accents are just as valid.
Describe how to say 'parth' ([pɑːθ]) in phonics then. Bet you can't.

Why can't you just accept it. That's what I do. It's just a standard way of defining sounds.

It might not be how people in Stanraer, Sunderland, St Austell or Swansea speak, but many words might sound different in those places.