Scottish accents and phonics

[suzikettles]

If you and your children have a Scottish accent were you a bit by dc's being taught [ar] and [er] as separate sounds?

Ds has just finished the Jolly Phonics sounds and came home with his last sound which was [ar]. The action is something like you're yawning (saying "ah, ah") but we don't pronounce ar like that as we actually use the sound [r] at the ends of words.

Ds isn't fazed at all, and it's not really a big deal, but is there a reason the school didn't just take them out? I guess all the children don't have Scottish accents though.

Are you actually in Scotland, Suzi? If so, you would think teachers would be able to adapt to local circumstances.

There are many regional 'issues' with standardised phonics. Children do work round it though. Sometimes the teacher explains it, or even has to adapt their own accent to emphasise the 'correct' sound for that area.

For example, I'm from far enough north to say /a/ in words like path, but I'll be teaching far enough south to recognise that my pupils will say /ar/.

I use the same vowel sounds for 'book' and 'put', but my Liverpudlian colleague says 'book' with the same sound as 'threw'.

And a Scottish /ch/ as in 'loch' isn't in any school phonics system that I've come across!

Oh yes! We're in deepest Glasgow.

I guess if they were teaching the sound in loch to the whole of the UK it would be an equivalent thing.

Anyway, like I said it's no big deal - I would have expected them to just ignore those sounds (although there will be some children in his class who use them in their speech) but I wondered if there was a reason for teaching them to everyone?

My guess, and I could be off is that although a different sound is used in speech the children still need to learn how to spell words correctly so missing out/adapting sounds could cause issues in this area

Not in this instance though. (Most) Scottish children would use the sounds [c] [a] [r] to say/spell "car" for example. Just as they would use the sounds [r] [a] [ck] to say "rack".

That long vowel sound represented by [ar] and [er] just doesn't exist in spoken Scottish English.

It's actually only the Jolly Phonics action that's wrong (for these children), because it doesn't make any sense when the pronunciation of the sound isn't the same as yawning. For the children I guess it's just the same as if they'd taught them that [ab] was a separate sound, or [et] or [es].

I think I understand you now, it is the sound needs to be presented to the children differently in order to make sense when it comes to getting words down on paper.
I am very easily confused when it comes to phonics it has to be said!
I am very familiar with the Glasgow accent and I really do see where you are coming from, I am myself from Liverpool but now live in Oxfordshire, there are some big differences in the sounds made in speech between the two places although not as great as Scottish accents. I think Jolly Phonics was written and developed by people in the south of England, it fits very well with the the speech pattens where I am now but the further north you get the more glitches there are!
My dd has issues with phonics due to speech problems and congenital issues within her mouth and throat, she just could not make the correct sounds and decoding was like a new level of hell for her, what she managed to produce rarely sounded enough like the word for her to decode poor thing! She is now in Y2 and is pretty much caught up with her reading and ever improving, if she keeps up the speed she is now she will end the year above average although she has found herself a mix of phonics and whole word recognition that works for her, pure phonics will just never work well within her physical limits.
I guess the thing to take away is that every child is an individual and no one programme is ever going to work with all children, or even groups of children, things have to be adapted and expanded to suit the pupils needs.

I can understand them not adapting to the broad Glesga accent but, as most Scots of all social classes pronounce the 'r' sound in the middle and at the ends of words, you would expect some accommodation to be made. It sounds like either the teacher is English, or is slavishly following the programme, even when it is not appropriate.,

We have the opposite problem. DS1 came home from school (also in Glasgow) having done 'ai' (pron like in 'hay'), with a picture of some stairs. DP and I are both from SE England and would never pronounce the vowels in those words (hay and stairs) the same. But although DS1 has an RP accent like mine, the teacher mad eno accommodation for it. Which is fine, given that we're in Glasgow.

DS started P1 in England many years ago, and teacher just couldn't understand that we didn't have a "long a" and a "short a" and, in fact, pronounced "car" and "bath" the same way! Two countries separated by a common longuage.

Er, that would be language.

you may be interested in having a look at Regional accents of English

Is the teacher English? They shouldn't be teaching ar as aah in Glasgow/Scotland at all.

But if the teacher is English you surely wouldn't expect her/him to put on a fake accent in order to teach 'ar' in the Scottish form?

If the teacher were English I'd still expect them to have enough knowledge to teach to the local accent, not to their own! Phonics isn't elocution lessons

What about posh teachers who pronounce wire 'waah' and fire 'faah'? And off 'orf'? It's a minefield, isn't it

They should still be able to teach to the local accent. It's not difficult.

No, I'm not suggesting s/he teaches them all to speak in cut-glass English, maizie. I'm merely saying that if I had a teacher in SE England who was from Glasgow/Yorkshire/Liverpool/ whatever, I wouldn't expect them to teach me an SE English accent. But neither would I expect them to teach to a broad Glesga/Yorkshire/Scouse accent either. As you say, it's not an elocution lesson, and children are probably quite good at distinguishing that such a teacher talks differently from them. I don't imagine it would cause major problems with reading.

www.jollylearning.co.uk/wordpress/audio/ar.mp3

I wonder if most Scottish schools just skip the [ar] and [or] then?

Teacher is Scottish by the way so she would have pronounced them arrr (like a pirate ) and orrr and not ahhh and ohhh.

I'm not Scottish and would pronounce them ar and or not ah and oh

dd1 started school just outside glasgow and ds1 learnt to speak whilst we living there. it was very bizarre. they put an extra syllable in every word. ('they' being the children - no idea what the teachers did) (stay-ers for stairs, gay-em for game)

we had to move to hampshire, honestly.

(i loved the pre-school concert though. only 'twankle twankle' little star will do for me now.)

dd1 would speak glaswegian when she role played. then revert back to surrey, darling to ask for some juice.

I suspect to Scottish ears your ar and or will sound like ahh and ohh. (ahh and ohh probably isn't right really).

The link you posted sounds like a long a sound to me - do you hear an "r" there?

Again, madwoman I bet they wouldn't be able to hear the extra syllable. There's a great QI episode where Stephen Fry talked about Scottish people insisting they didn't have an accent

Madwoman, I hope you got a filum of the pre school concert!