Schwa sound, how (if at all) is it taught? (For teachers and experts in general)

[Arkadia]

For my benefit, are schwas taught at all in England, within the teaching of phonics I mean.
If yes, how is the subject tackled?
If no, how do you overcome it when learning to spell?

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

My suspicion is, that it is covered in reception as part of phase 3 mschook but it falls down in year 1 when it gets to teaching the alternative spellings.

It’s only anecdotal, but neither of the year 1 teachers I’ve spoken to about it over the past couple of years have taught it with one saying it was bad phonics teaching to teach the schwa. Most reception teachers I know are at least aware of it.

[pasbeaucoupdegendarme]

Thanks, @Norestformrz, I’ll mention this to our KS1 person 😳

[Norestformrz]

"Children who have not heard and processed vocabulary (for instance in Tier 2) can find decoding difficult, " like adults who meet unfamiliar vocabulary in texts they can only approximate how the word is pronounced ... nothing to do with finding decoding difficult

[Norestformrz]

"Letters and Sounds phase 3 'er' is supposed to be taught as the short 'er' sound (summer, " you must remember that the alternative representations aren't taught until phase 5 of Letters and Sounds.

[Norestformrz]

"If there is no word gap," no one has said that there isn't a word gap simply that the 30 million word gap of the 60s has been debunked in recent years.

[MsChookandtheelvesofFahFah]

In Letters and Sounds phase 3 'er' is supposed to be taught as the short 'er' sound (summer, ladder etc) as opposed to the long 'er' sound taught in phase 5 (term, herb etc). I have yet to meet a teacher who does this! I'm a TA and I always talk about the short 'er' . Also when children read the word 'a' in their books, a cat, a dog etc I do sometimes emphasise it is not 'a' as in 'ant' or 'a' as in 'apron and model the correct pronunciation. But I don't know if it is taught explicitly further up the school.

[mathanxiety]

But others who don't have a natural feel for spelling and take phonics too literally, because of how they have been taught in all fairness, struggle. For children with no books in their homes, illiterate parents and no access to libraries, this is a big issue.

Children who have not heard and processed vocabulary (for instance in Tier 2) can find decoding difficult, as they have no working memory to draw on in their attack. Obviously, trying to figure out meaning is going to present obstacles too, if vocab is not familiar and if textual context offers few or no clues.

Even children who are very well read and who have learned a lot just from reading can have difficulties. I once watched the annual American National Geography Bee on TV and heard a contestant pronounce the word Ontario 'On-tah-RIO' in an answer. The answer was Ontario and he was awarded the points, but I wondered if he would understand that On-TARE-ee-o and On-tah-RIO were not two different places (or lakes).

[mathanxiety]

If there is no word gap, what in your opinion accounts for the fact that so many children do not achieve functional literacy, struggle with comprehension once learning to decode is replaced with purposeful reading that is necessary in order to access and understand content?

Please do not answer with a meme.

The problem with the Sperry paper is that the authors of that study theorised that overheard language contributes to children's vocabulary acquisition in a meaningful way. Golingkoff et al have demonstrated that the important element in vocabulary development is language directed specifically at children - verbal interaction in a relationship results in the development of a vocabulary foundation that is essential to reading (as opposed to decoding).

Sperry et al did not replicate Hart and Risley in their cohort or methodology.
They counted ambient speech as well as speech specifically directed to the child.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797613488145
Abstract
Infants differ substantially in their rates of language growth, and slow growth predicts later academic difficulties. In this study, we explored how the amount of speech directed to infants in Spanish-speaking families low in socioeconomic status influenced the development of children’s skill in real-time language processing and vocabulary learning. All-day recordings of parent-infant interactions at home revealed striking variability among families in how much speech caregivers addressed to their child. Infants who experienced more child-directed speech became more efficient in processing familiar words in real time and had larger expressive vocabularies by the age of 24 months, although speech simply overheard by the child was unrelated to vocabulary outcomes. Mediation analyses showed that the effect of child-directed speech on expressive vocabulary was explained by infants’ language-processing efficiency, which suggests that richer language experience strengthens processing skills that facilitate language growth.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3445663/
Dismisses the possibility of overheard speech contributing to vocabulary development, emphasises the importance of all directed speech, contradicts Sperry.
...not all speech that children hear is equally relevant for word learning, at least in a culture where children are routinely addressed directly.
So Sperry's assertion, based on the existence of overheard speech, that the word gap is far smaller than posited by Hart and Risley, and that overheard speech counts as a foundation builder for vocab, is called into question.

www.ascd.org/publications/books/113040/chapters/What-Does-the-Research-Say-About-Vocabulary%C2%A2.aspx
A general discussion of vocabulary and other deficits that contribute to failure to access the curriculum in school.

An interesting inclusion on vocabulary:

The Three Tiers

In 1985, Beck and McKeown suggested that every literate person has a vocabulary consisting of three levels (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002). Tier 1 words consist of basic words. These words usually do not have multiple meanings and do not require explicit instruction. Sight words, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and early reading words occur at this level. Examples of Tier 1 words are book, girl, sad, clock, baby, dog, and orange. There are about 8,000 word families in English included in Tier 1. Tier 2 contains high-frequency words that occur across a variety of domains. These words play a large role in the vocabulary of mature language users. As a result, Tier 2 words may have a large impact in the everyday functioning of language. Because of their lack of redundancy in oral language, Tier 2 words present challenges to students who primarily meet them in print. Tier 2 words consist of such words as coincidence, masterpiece, absurd, industrious, and benevolent. Because Tier 2 words play an important role in direct instruction, there are certain characteristics that these words have:

Usually have multiple meanings
Used in a variety of subject areas
Necessary for reading comprehension
Characteristic of a mature language user
Descriptive words that add detail

Tier 3 consists of words whose practical use and frequency is low. These words are domain-specific and are used for brief periods of time when we are studying particular content. Tier 3 words are central to building knowledge and conceptual understanding within the various academic domains and should be integral to instruction of content. Medical, legal, biology and mathematics terms are all examples of these words. Although useful while covering specific topics, these are too specific to be included in the most useful tier for vocabulary building, Tier 2.

[Norestformrz]

Extract From the Sound Write programme
The rigour of the above should be sufficient to set the scene for the introduction of the schwa. As soon as it has been firmly established how polysyllabic words are structured, teachers should be asking the students to recognise which of the two syllables in a two-syllable word is the one we say louder or with more stress. Initially, this should be done with words not containing a schwa (‘sunlit’, ‘pigpen’, etc.) This activity gets them used to thinking about stress before it becomes important: i.e. when they have to identify where the schwa is likely to appear (the weak syllable).

You can teach students to become explicitly aware of stressed syllables by having to hand a list of two-syllable words, saying them orally, and asking students to listen carefully and tell you which of the two syllables is stressed. You can play the game of stressing the weak syllable, which often sounds so incongruous students find it amusing: “Is it SUNlit, or sunLIT? Is it batMAN or BATman?” Although L1 (mother- tongue) speakers of English put stress on words in their spoken vocabulary naturally, they may need to be made explicitly aware of this.

From conducting the above exercise orally, you can move on to Lesson 12. Although many students will be able to identify the weak syllable and indeed the weak vowel sound in simple two-syllable words quite quickly when they’re word building, the ideal time to practise locating schwas is in word reading. Where schwas occur, there should be an aural discrepancy between the way in which the vowel sound is read in the isolated syllable (i.e. quite formally) and when it is read as a whole word. For example, in Lesson 12, you put in the line to separate the syllables, ask the student to say the sounds, read up to the line, and say the syllable. Then you repeat the process with the second syllable and read the word. In the word ‘frogman’, the process looks like this:
frog|man -> /f/ /r/ /o/ /g/, ‘frog’; /m/ /a/ /n/, ‘man’; ‘frog’ ‘man’, ‘frogman’. So, when the word is read normally, the sound, represented by the < a >, becomes a schwa.
This is the point at which we need to tell our students that if they think that the spelling of the schwa might cause them problems, they need to say the word precisely in its syllables – and the spelling voice should solve the problem. This approach also works well with words, such as ‘government’ and ‘environmental’, in which we elide sounds.

[Norestformrz]

It should

[pasbeaucoupdegendarme]

This is all really interesting. It’s not something that my school’s phonics program teaches (Soundswrite).

[Norestformrz]

.

[Norestformrz]

http://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-literacy/there-really-30-million-word-gap

[Norestformrz]

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/the-long-contentious-history-of-the-word-gap-study/562850/

[Norestformrz]

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/the-long-contentious-history-of-the-word-gap-study/562850/

[Norestformrz]

"Apparently Oxford University Press has not heard of Sperry et al." Perhaps it doesn't fit in with what they wanted to promote at that point.

[gotmychocolateimgood]

I'm a primary teacher. I was never taught about schwa during my PGCE or on phonics training. I picked up my knowledge of it from the SENCO during my first year of teaching. Letters and Sounds doesn't mention it. Children are taught to read and spell a, the, etc as 'tricky words' which should be learnt by sight. I suppose the assumption is that eventually once they have finished phonics teaching, so year 2, they have read widely enough to have encountered the schwa through building familiarity of the words. For many children this is enough. But others who don't have a natural feel for spelling and take phonics too literally, because of how they have been taught in all fairness, struggle. For children with no books in their homes, illiterate parents and no access to libraries, this is a big issue.

[mathanxiety]

fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/oxed/Oxford-Language-Report.PDF?region=international
UK vocabulary deficiency and its impact.

Apparently Oxford University Press has not heard of Sperry et al.

[mathanxiety]

www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2018/05/21/defending-the-30-million-word-gap-disadvantaged-children-dont-hear-enough-child-directed-words/
Same basic article in less technical language.

[mathanxiety]

www.danielwillingham.com/daniel-willingham-science-and-education-blog/the-debunking-of-hart-risley-and-how-we-use-science

The "Debunking" of Hart & Risley and How We Use Science
Daniel Willingham

The recent kerfuffle concerning Hart & Risley (1995) and the 30 million word gap offers an object lesson in science, the interpretation of science, and the relation of science and policy.

Let’s start with the new science. Douglas Sperry and colleagues sought to replicate Hart & Risley, who reported the 30 million word gap—that’s the projected difference in total number of words directed to a child by caregivers when comparing children of parents on public assistance and children of parents in professional positions. Sperry and his team claim not to find a statistically reliable difference among parents of different social classes.
​
​Coverage from NPR made it sound like Hart & Risley had been debunked, with the headline “Let’s stop talking about the 30 million word gap.”

But the Sperry report doesn’t really upend Hart & Risley.

First, Sperry et al. claim that the Hart & Risley finding has never been replicated. I am not sure what Sperry et al. mean by “replicate,” because the conceptual idea that socioeconomic status and volume of caregiver→child speech has been replicated. (The following list is not offered as complete—I stopped looking after I found five.)

Gilkerson et al (2017)
Hoff (2003)
Hoff-Ginsberg (1998)
Huttenlocher et al (2010)
Rowe (2008)

None of these is an exact replication---they have variations in methods, population, and analyses. The same is true of Sperry et al

......................
templeinfantlab.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/09/GolinkoffHoffRoweTamisLeMondaHirshPasek2018.pdf
"Language Matters: Denying the Existence of the 30 Million Word Gap has Serious Consequences"
Argues for the importance of retaining focus on the vital ingredient to language learning—quality speech directed to children rather than overheard speech, the focus of Sperry et al.’s argument.

There is little question that the language addressed to children matters for language development per se and for all its collateral benefits—for acquiring informationabout the world, developing self regulation skillsand executive function, and engaging with teachers and peers. Overhearing language about death and taxes—topics of interest to adults—can never be as effective for language learning as participating in contingent conversations about what matters to children.

[Norestformrz]

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.13072
"Amid growing controversy about the oft‐cited “30‐million‐word gap,” this investigation uses language data from five American communities across the socioeconomic spectrum to test, for the first time, Hart and Risley's (1995) ... Results do not support Hart and Risley's claim, reveal substantial variation in vocabulary environments within each socioeconomic stratum, and suggest that definitions of verbal environments that exclude multiple caregivers and bystander talk disproportionately underestimate the number of words to which low‐income children are exposed."

[mathanxiety]

But very easy and quite instinctive to explain well that although that word looks like/is spelled tom-ah-toe, that's the same word that we pronounce "tum-ah-toe", without necessarily needing to explain schwa.
Bertie


You have highlighted the relationship between familiarity with vocabulary and split-second recognition of the written word that contributes to learning to read and spell. Much of what advocates of phonics are talking about is the mechanical act of decoding, which of course is important, but there is far more to reading than sounding out. There are feedback mechanisms of the sort you describe, and there is visual recognition of word shapes.

This is essentially why a wide spoken vocabulary is essential to children as they approach the formal learning environment. It is why children aged 3-4 with a small vocabulary hardly ever succeed in school beyond the level where decoding will suffice as an approach to reading.

It is estimated that by the time deprived children in the US reach kindergarten (aged 5) they will have heard 30 million fewer words than children from better off homes.
www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/10/american-kids-are-starving-for-words/381552/

There is a case to be made for essentially teaching English as a second language for some children who have been exposed to minimal language or who have not used language optimally as a tool of communication up to age 4/5. This is essentially what programmes intended to boost vocab and background knowledge are all about.

pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0050/138ea2aa886e7b53b9bf7d85b6f2f3dd82c6.pdf
"The Effects of Vocabulary Knowledge and Background Knowledge on Reading Comprehension of Taiwanese EFL Students"

[Arkadia]

Thanks, @norestformrz.

According to Wikipedia examples of timed stressed languages are:
English, Thai, German, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Catalan, Norwegian, Faroese, Dutch, European Portuguese.
I know a Danish speaker and I know people who live in the Netherlands, so I could ask them.
However, maybe someone here speaks one or more of those languages and can enlighten us on how they deal with vowel reduction.

[Norestformrz]

No one claims it's easy but the alternative is illiteracy

[mathanxiety]

User198174, the Swarabakhti vowel is found in Gaeilge (Irish) too, and therefore on Hiberno English.

It used to be more common but RTE English and exposure to American and British English through media have had an effect on Hiberno English over the decades.