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?

[Norestformrz]

A schwa is the unstressed vowel sound in the unstressed syllable of words of two or more syllables

[Norestformrz]

https://www.logicofenglish.com/blog/60-spelling/392-what-is-a-schwa-helping-students-read-and-spell-the-schwa-sound

[womanhuman]

This is why phonics are stupid. They don’t work with accents, and we have many, many accents.

[CountFosco]

A bit like in parts Scotland that add spurious schwas as in girol and filem ;)

DH is from those parts so I'm very fond of going to see a filum myself!

[Norestformrz]

Phonics isn't access dependent and works with every accent womanhuman.

[Arkadia]

@Norestformrz

*It is taught ask my Y1 class ...they know we have to use our special spelling voices to say words precisely to help us spell."

Can you elaborate? What are you referring to?

[womanhuman]

norest, not accent dependent but difficult if you speak differently to your children.

[Norestformrz]

They learn that it is the vowel that allows us to say a word loudly and without the vowel we can only "whisper" it and in words with more than one syllable some are loud (stressed) and others are "whispered" (unstressed) and in "whispered" syllables we don't say the vowel clearly/precisely so it is the sound we call schwa ( young children like the name) and we look at words like the and colour and chicken and children and bottom etc. They learn that it makes spelling more difficult and it helps to say the word precisely.

[Norestformrz]

Not really womanhuman you adjust teaching to the learners accent just as teachers need to teach to the child's accent.

[Norestformrz]

https://theliteracyblog.com/2011/06/05/the-dreaded-schwa/

[Arkadia]

Mrz, that article is a bit disappointing ;) I was getting into it and was expecting some pearls of wisdom, but instead it ended... :D

[TheWaiting]

but I say fig-your for figure! Although DH says, fig-ur!
I still don’t understand how it’s unstressed.

[Norestformrz]

Fig your or fig yur?

[Norestformrz]

As the article says if you've never seen the word in print it's very difficult to know how to spell the schwa in individual words

[TheWaiting]

Def fig-your

[TheWaiting]

Although they sound very close in my head.

[Norestformrz]

I'd pronounce your as y+ or

[BertieBotts]

I had never heard of the schwa until I did TEFL training. It's taught to English learners, but not to native children as part of phonics. I'd guess (?) it's not part of a PGCE either - only if you study linguistics or something like that.

I think your question "How can you solve a problem when you don't know the problem exists?" is the issue. Children don't know it exists, parents don't, teachers may not.

Spelling voice sounds like what I tend to do mentally. I've always been quite good at spelling and tend to "hear" a word as it is spelled in my head rather than the way it would be said out loud. For example, would has an L sound in it, pronounce starts with the word pronoun, etc. I'd not say these words out loud like this but mentally that's how I think of them when I am spelling them.

Schwa sounds like "uh" and it's the sound of -er (in non-rhotic accents) at the end of mother, butter, farmer and so on. It's also the sound of A in woman, O in police, both Es in recipient (though in my accent the first e sounds more like i in pig), Y in pyjama (I assume why the American spelling is pajama). In English we tend to have stress on multi-syllable words so to use recipient as an example, you say reCIPient, it would sound strange if you said RECipient (sounds like recipe - unt). Sometimes the stress changes the meaning of the word e.g. RECord vs recORD. Often vowel sounds in the unstressed part will take on the schwa sound.

But also we do it with the "small" words in between other words, because we stress particular words in a sentence, if you don't, you sound like a robot. So for example "Do you want a cup of tea?" becomes "D'ya wanna cuppa tea?" No matter how well spoken you are this happens. The stress is on WANT, CUP, TEA. (This is also why people think it's "could of, should of" etc - because the have becomes a schwa and the word of commonly becomes a schwa as well, so they sound identical, even if they are pronounced as schwa + v).)

If you tend to naturally enunciate and/or do "spelling voice" you won't hear it when you try to say individual words out loud. You have to try saying the word in a natural sentence.

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

It's taught to English learners, but not to native children as part of phonics.

It should be taught to native children and some phonics schemes (if not most) do have it. I’m not convinced it is being taught though.

[mathanxiety]

Oh so is schwa the saying of a t like a ch? As in tuna?
TheWaiting

No.

The schwa is the neutral vowel sound encountered in millions of English words, mainly in the unstressed syllable/s of two-syllable or multi-syllabic words.

It makes a mockery of the notion that English can be taught phonetically. The only way English makes sense phonetically is to mispronounce millions of words so as to ensure correct spelling.

The schwa is found in all accents.

Learners of English as a second language have to be taught about the schwa or their spoken English sounds completely wrong. It sounds wrong because they often pronounce vowels exactly as they see them written (i.e. they use the 'spelling' pronunciation).

[Norestformrz]

Nonsense. The schwa makes spelling more difficult but it doesn't negate the importance of phonics in the reading and writing process.

[MayFayner]

Schwa is the sound you make if you just open your mouth and make a noise.

Uh / eh / er are some ways it is commonly written, in dialogue in novels for example, often at the start of a sentence.

The last vowel sound in “conversation” is schwa, whatever way you pronounce that vowel sound is how you pronounce schwa in your accent.

It is the most common sound in the English language. In spelling it can be represented by various vowels or vowel combinations.

[Arkadia]

@BertieBotts, thank you for your detailed post. I already knew all that but it is nice to see it expressed in a cogent way. Will refer to it when trying to explain why the schwa is a problem. ;)

Now all is left to do is to find a way forward.
To me it was such a a-ha moment when (quite recently) I have come to realize that spelling mistakes primarily originate from schwas (and doubles...).
For example, my little one wrote "astonAshing" (fair enough, I suppose) but in this case there was no slowing down of the pronunciation that helped. Hopefully now she'll remember.

[BertieBotts]

Oh yes, it's clear you know what it is, OP - I was trying to help out other posters expressing confusion or not knowing what it was, that's all.

The slowing down thing is more about pronouncing as is written, which isn't necessarily saying slowly but might mean saying in a strange way - so I'd say astoNISH(ing) to emphasise that one.

Good point math about the difference between English learners and people learning literacy, in that those moving from spoken to written language will tend to have the correct (or regionally common) pronunciation so ingrained that a confusing spelling won't interfere with that so it makes sense to mangle the pron a bit for the sake of correct spelling. Whereas English learners find pronunciation more tricky and are likely to encounter written language more than spoken, at least at first, so it makes sense to explain about the schwa explicitly.

I also imagine it might be a bit of a headache to be a young child learning about spelling to be told well this sound can be spelled er, ar, a, e, i, y, o, eh, u, uh, ur, ugh, etc. 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.

The sound I have trouble spelling is ei/ie because both can say ee like bee, or ie like pie, or ee-schwa. It's much easier in German because ei is always ie like pie, and ie is always ee like bee.

[Arkadia]

For those who want to know more...

Bear in mind that English is a stress timed language, as opposed to, say, Italian or French which are syllable stressed.
For more information see here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony
A nice video I have just found is this one (it is in American English, but no matter). Note that the speaker never mentions the schwa by name, but this is what she is referring to (also note the inverted "e" symbol, which is the schwa symbol in the phonetic alphabet)

Interesting to see that, thinking about myself as a NON native speaker of English, I was NEVER taught any of that, but gosh, wouldn't that have been good to know, so it would have spared me years of agony trying to make myself understood :D
Still, I can't see how you can present a phonics approach to spelling, but divorce it from its most common sound. It is like teaching the alphabet doing away with the letter "a", or teach numeracy without the zero.
There again, what do I know ;)