Inspired by another thread - phonics and regional accents?

[FlaviaAlbia]

This has been puzzling me a bit and DS is too young to be learning phonics at the minute so I can't ask a teacher.

But how does it work? Does it assume a correct pronunciation of words?

I'm thinking of different accidents and dialects where scarf and giraffe rhyme for some people but not others.

It would be extremely odd to hear DS rhyming those when reading but maybe phonics are adjusted by the area?

We're just sending this over to primary education at the OP's request.

Watching as my dad asked me this question!

In my personal experience it's a little bit tricky! I trained to be a teacher in the North West with pronunciations like churr for chair etc. My own pronunciation also is regional, so for instance for 'poor' I would say 'poo-er' instead of 'pore' like they did.

We did muddle through though.

I think teachers just have to adapt whatever scheme they're using the majority accent of their class (school?).

e.g Jolly Phonics has /ar/ as one of the fairly early sounds you learn, but it's not really used in Scottish accents so I don't think ds's school really taught it. Obviously some children in a Scottish class may have it in their accent and presumably the same allowances will be made for them as would for a Scottish accented child in a majority SE England accented class.

It's a very interesting question but I don't know the answer! My dc are southerners with SE accents but we moved to the NW 3 years ago. They are 9 and 11 now and have not picked up the local accent at all. If they'd been Reception age when we moved, I think they'd have found it very confusing (not least because there's quiet a variation in accents between the teachers at our village primary, one of whom is a southerner who's developed a slight local twang!).

Actually, I'm talking bollocks. Of course Scottish children use /ar/ (car, far etc).

I think I'm confusing it with the illustration for the sound which is a doctor making a child say "Ahh" which isn't the sound when you have a Scottish accent.

Maybe they used a pirate saying "Arrrrr" instead...

I'm an ex-primary teacher. I trained and had my first teaching job in Barnsley. I don't have a Barnsley accent myself and with certain sounds I chatted with the class (Y4) about how I would pronounce the sound and how they would and how both were correct because we had different accents. All the class had really strong regional accents so I would never have tried to 'correct' them to an rp pronounciation!

After that I moved to Australia and was teaching phonics to Australian year ones! They were a bit young to understand the different accent thing and it confused them so I just put on an Aussie accent for certain sounds!

I find this very interesting. I am a foreigner.
I can decode words in my head, using phonics knowledge I learned while ds was learning phonics at school. But actual pronunciation, I can't pronounce a lot of words correctly, due to my foreign accent. But since I learned phonics, it made me a lot easier to spell words correctly.
Very interesting to know how does it work with different regional accent, even among native speakers.

In my almost ten year old copy of the Letters and Sounds book it mentions accents, that some sounds' classification depends upon accent (for example 'grass' in Phase 5 is in the /ar/ column with an * next to it because in places like Yorkshire it's pronounced with an /a/ sound).

Thanks, this is all facinating!

Yes to the smartest giant in town hate giraffe sounds similar to laugh for me.

“Does it assume a correct pronunciation of words?” No it doesn’t assume that their is a correct pronunciation of any word as all regional variations are correct.

I'm agreeing with the Smartest Giant in town. Northern accent here and it just doesn't work.

DS1 did his early years of primary in south west. As I taught him to read, he read in a northern accent despite talking in a southern.

Weirdly, now we are up north and DS2 has started school, he reads words such as "laugh" in a southern accent despite being around all northerners.

And I fucking hate The Smartest Giant in Town incidentally because the verbal gymnastics required to make some of it rhyme annoy me so much when the kids pick it for a bedtime story. When I rule the world I'm banning scarf-wearing by all fictional giraffes.

So true!!!!

So, it sounds like the concept of phonics is taught to teachers who then adapt it for the region their teaching in?

Or something like that?

Oops, they're not their

Yeah - teachers teach the sound according to the accent of the children - so I have to say the words differently than I would in my accent. I was practising a sound last week because it’s very unnatural for me to say it!

That must be hard! Do you have to change it for kids with different accents in a class?

I'm just being nosy now

No I teach to the majority of the class (or my group really as we split the children for phonics). My accent is still northern but I’m from a difffereng area and I do really have to think about it sometimes (sometimes phonics resources have rhyming words that just don’t rhyme for me)

Younger children - you teach to the majority of the class.

Older children - You make it a teaching point. You also make sure you aren't the one doing the spelling part of SATs

Phonics and phonetics aren't synonyms, so teaching the phonic code is unaffected by accent.

You also make sure you aren't the one doing the spelling part of SATs
although I remember a teacher at my South East primary school noting that the year 2s tested by a northern teacher were more successful at spelling "path" than those tested by a local teacher!

So, it sounds like the concept of phonics is taught to teachers who then adapt it for the region their teaching in?
This works for a lot of things in education, eg primary teachers learn to teach handwriting but then need to adapt their resources for the handwriting policy of the school where they work.

I think that's a bit beyond me at the minute AuntieStella, I don't understand phonics enough to make sense of how that's the case, though I'm glad it is...

Letter and Sounds adapts phonemes according to accents. For example the sound /ar/ is also taught as /a/ as in /bath/ if you live in Southern regions but not the north.

I' a northerner but teach in Yorkshire and I had to adapt how I say the sound /ai/ when teaching my Y2s years ago. Now I have lived her more than half my life, it comes natural to me.

I was trained in Yorkshire prior to phonics being a thing in schools (late 90s) so I trained on the job. But phonics is taught with strong regional differences in mind and its up to the teacher to adapt as necessary for whatever region they teach. Certainly if I was to go and teach in Bedfordshire I would have to teach children that the /a/ in /castle/ and /bath/ make a /ar/ sound not an /a/ sound as in /cat/ as it does where I teach!