More difficult phonics help pls

[Firstconkers]

Would anyone experienced in phonic decoding, pls help me understand and explain to my DC the ough and augh sounds.
There seems to be several sounds for ough? Thought, through, cough, bough etc
In cough and laugh, are the sounds broken down ie gh is f?

I have goggled but don't seem to be able to find a simple and straight forward explaination. Should I just teach as sight words but then what about learning to spell the words. Much appreciated.

The others (ai, au, ee, ie, oe, long oo, ou, yoo, oi, ar, air, er, ir, or) are vowel blends. Masha that is utter nonsense!

/ai/ is not a blend!
/ee/ is not a blend!
/ie/ is not a blend!
/oe/ is not a blend!
/oo/ is not a blend!

etc etc etc etc ..............

The OED phonetics are standing somewhere between mrz's assertions and masha's there.
ai is a blend of e and i
ee is listed as a long vowel sound not a blend - your mouth doesn't move.
ie is a blend of a different a sound (not used in its standard English pronunciations) and i
oe is a blend of schwa and i
oo is a long vowel sound not a blend

If you can't hear it mrz maybe you can feel your mouth move? What accent do you speak, maybe it's different? Assume OED are giving standard English pronunciations.

Sorry, oe is a blend of schwa and u as in put, my mistake.

catkind are you looking at the phonetic alphabet by any chance?

www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/phonemic-chart

I pronounce it the same ways as the on line OED

www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/sound?q=sounds#sound__15

I already said several times that I am looking at the phonetic alphabet. We were talking about splitting words into individual sounds, and that's exactly what phonetics does. I can hear the blends in the diphthongs really clearly in the first link you gave there.
OK, how about this. Try saying "ow" with a finger in your mouth. You can start but you can't finish, right? You need to close your lips to make the second sound.
Apologies OP, phonics discussions seem to cause massive digressions round here!

Yes and I've already pointed out that you seem to be confused by the IPA symbols

I'm not confused. If you think I've got something wrong say what. I think you may be thinking that because they list the combinations of IPA symbols for the diphthongs they are somehow one sound. But even your own link talks about listing diphthongs "according to their second sound", so I don't think that's right.

The OED defines diphtongs as
a compound vowel sound produced by combining two simple ones.
Ai, ie and oe are very clearly that.

To me, ee and long oo have a trace of the y (consonant after them), but this quite irrelevant to parents trying to help a child to read.

The different sound for ai (laid, said, plait), ie (believe, pie, quiet), oe (toe, shoe, does) and all the 60+ other spellings are perennial difficulty. Straightforward advice on how best to deal with those would undoubtedly be much appreciated, instead of forever claiming that it's just a matter of sounding out and blending which it clearly is not.

Wasn't it you who told me not to introduce "technical language" masha? Diphthongs as you know are phonetics NOT phonics by muddling the two you create unnecessary confusion and make it more complex. In phonics we teach the skill of blending there are no blends.

OK, this is interesting stuff. From a linguistics forum:

"Phonetics is about the physical aspect of sounds, it studies the production and the perception of sounds, called phones. Phonetics has some subcategories, but if not specified, we usually mean the "articolatory phonetics" that is "the study of the production of speech sounds by the articulatory and vocal tract by the speaker". Phonetic transcriptions are done using the square brackets, [ ].

Phonology is about the abstract aspect of sounds and it studies the phonemes (phonemic trancriptions adopt the slash / /). Phonology is about establishing what are the phonemes in a given language, i.e. those sounds that can bring a difference in meaning between two words. A phoneme is a phonic segment with a meaning value, for example in minimal pairs: ..."

So to paraphrase a summary, phonetics is about splitting into single units of sound, phonics is about splitting into single units of meaning?

I also found some debate about whether diphthongs are actually one or two phonemes, but the consensus seems to be one. linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1149/is-a-diphthong-one-phoneme-or-two-or-does-it-depend

My understanding is that phonetics is the scientific study of sounds and looks at how speech sounds are physically formed (in any language), whereas phonics is the method used to teach children to read or write a specific language by associating letters with an agreed code of (in our case 44) sounds.

Phonics helps children to develop their phonemic awareness. In phonics, ow, io, ng, ear are classed as single sounds for the purpose of teaching phonics, and form four of the 44 sounds found on classroom phonic charts. Once children have learnt the 44 sounds, and their corresponding spelling choices, they become adept at both segmenting words into their separate sounds, and blending them together to form words.

So to paraphrase a summary, phonetics is about splitting into single units of sound, phonics is about splitting into single units of meaning?

You posted this while I was writing my last post, but yes, I think this could be the significant difference, assuming (which I think you do) that by meaning you mean that changing that one phoneme would make it into a different word? And it certainly does make sense to teach children the simpler version concerned with meaning (phonics) than the far more complex pure sounds idea (phonetics).

Yes catkind linguists use the phonetic alphabet/symbo (100+)ls to transcribe speech ... they also add 30ish diacritics to modify these and 20 ish additional signs to indicate other speech qualities such as tone or stress.

"So to paraphrase a summary, phonetics is about splitting into single units of sound, phonics is about splitting into single units of meaning? No phonics is not about units of meaning ... /u/ by itself is meaningless. The smallest unit of meaning is a morpheme - do, the, girl are morphemes but are made up of a number of phoneme - girls is two morphemes - girl + s (as this changes the meaning of the word)

I understood Catkind to mean that if you change one phoneme in a word, it changes the meaning; as in changing the first phoneme in bed to fed, changing the second phoneme in bowl to bawl or changing the final phoneme in thing to thick. Although linguists studying phonetics might be able to hear two distinct sounds in 'ow' or 'oy' in terms of how they are physically formed, they are considered to be one phoneme in terms of teaching phonics, and changing them changes the meaning of the word, cow to coy for example.

Yes a different phoneme changes the word - eg: sat to sit or cup to cut but phonics is not about splitting into single units of meaning InfantSchoolHead.

Yes, that's what I understood the quote to be saying InfantSchoolHead. I'm not quite sure how you turn that into a proper definition of a phoneme, as you could equally say if "cow" is c-a-u that changing the u sound to t changes the meaning to "cat". But for the sake of this discussion I'm happy to accept that there is a way to define it properly. In which case I was wrong to think that phonemes don't exist independently of written language. They just exist as a linguistic smallest unit rather than a smallest unit of sound as mrz was claiming.

I'm well aware of what phonics is about mrz, but I was trying to capture the difference between how a sound is physically formed in terms of phonetics and how we differentiate that with the phonemes we teach for the purposes of reading and writing.

Catkind - yes, I did consider the same thing, but also came to the conclusion that they exist as a commonly agreed linguistic unit which we call a phoneme for the purposes of teaching phonics, even if technically they aren't the smallest unit of sound from a phonetic alphabet point of view.

you could equally say if "cow" is c-a-u that changing the u sound to t changes the meaning to "cat". No you couldn't because cow isn't c-a-u the phonetic transcription is /'ka?/

/a?/ is a single unit you can't split it without changing the phonemic value, just as 34 cannot be split into 3 and 4 without changing the numerical value

I haven't claimed that phonemes are the smallest unit of sound catkind

cat - /'kæt/ the letter a in the word cat represents the sound /æ/

I don't know how to type phonetic symbols. That doesn't change the point I was making.

You have been talking throughout the conversation about how ow does not split into two sounds, you can't hear two sounds in it etc. It does split into two sounds, they are a and ? (copypasting from your post now!). You'd just rather we didn't split it because it's a single unit (phoneme) from a phonics point of view. Now we're agreed that it doesn't need to be split phonically (which I never intended to debate), can you actually hear the two sounds?

Re 21:00:32, I think that is splitting hairs. "a" is an a sound of a slightly different length. I can dig out an example where both options are phonetically exact if it will make you any happier. Maybe not with ow as the phonetic "a" is not usual in English, but with another diphthong.