LR - Incorrect Phonics in Word Split

[derialc]

Has anyone else noticed this? I've come across it a few times now. Sometimes the words are split incorrectly and sometimes they are words that just aren't suitable for teaching phonics. 

For example -

CRAYON is split into Cra- (which is incorrectly pronounced Cray) and -yon. It should have been split into Cray- and -on and then the sounds would be ok.

TABLE is split into Ta- (pronounced Tay) and - ble. T- and -able would be better.

Maybe I'm just nit-picking but as a teacher of primary aged kids it really grates on me to see the program teaching that CRA and TA make a long A (ay) sound when they don't. They make a short A sound like in bat. 

It doesn't really affect me because I just skip over the incorrect ones but I can't help but think about parents who might be using LR to teach English as a second language and are inadvertently teaching incorrect phonics....

[ydolem]

Agree with you. The sounds are not pure phonics either. It says 'Buh' 'IRD' or 'Cuh' 'OW' and I do think it isnt quite right from a phonics point of view.

[lelask]

following.
I am using it to teach children English as a second language.

[luv2laugh]

Yup.  I noticed right away and it used to bother me a lot.  I actually sent a lengthy email in to brillkids.  I just skip through that section quickly just for the review.  I don't feel right flashing incorrect info.

[derialc]

Glad to see I'm not the only one!

luv2laugh - did you get any reply to your email?

[Krista G]

I can see that crayon is wrong, but table is not.

You can see here.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/table?s=t

It has a long a song and is split right after the a.  I even checked my huge unabridged dictionary and that is how it shows it.

[derialc]

The long A sound is created by the presence of the E at the end of the word though... In isolation "ta" is short. It's just not a great word to teach phonics with really! I think it would've been better to only include words that follow straightforward rules for the Word Split section.

[PokerDad]

We've done phonics and I have no issues with the split. You guys are correct and it's a bit annoying to hear "buh" for b....

I think perhaps you're overlooking a main benefit which is demonstrating word segments. I do this a lot with Cub when I write a word and cover part of it to make decoding easier

[luv2laugh]

I didn't receive a response, except an auto one when I first sent it in.  I think it was around the time they were moving offices, so maybe that's why there was no response. 

A lot of programs add /uh/ sounds to consonants, so that doesn't bother me too much.  I'm also a teacher and also nitpicky.  I actually think the /c/ ow and /p/ ig are really great, even with the added /uh/ sound.  I do think the color segmentation to divide words is helpful and also cover up parts of words with fingers when helping kids decode, Pokerdad, most kids won't be confused, but open and closed syllables are important in knowing what sound the vowel makes.  I just flipped through and most of them are correct, but if lizard was really divided as LI-ZARD, it would be pronounced as a long I, as in LIE.  Since I spend my days teaching kids to divide words, that gives me the heeby jeebies.  It is easy enough to skip those, though.  I doubt there would be lasting damage, but I do remember what Doman said about flashing incorrect info and would prefer to avoid it.

I don't really know a lot about EL, so am definitely a novice in knowing if it would do good or bad.  If I didn't know the rules myself though, I would avoid the multi-syllable divisions and just make sure to pronounce consonants clearly myself.  So... your chin shouldn't drop while saying a consonant sound.  If you are dropping your chin, you are probably adding a vowel on.  So /k/ vs. /kuh/.  You can easily just click through the word splits if there is any doubt and still get review.  I would doubt just having the different colors would negatively impact anything. 

[Tamsyn]

I skip over this part too.  The "cuh" in cow, etc, is especially annoying to me, not just from phonics, but more specifically from a diction point of view.  My oldest son didn't read as early, but his diction was impeccable when he was little because I tried to teach him to read English the same way I learned to read other languages in my diction classes as a music major.  So we practiced making sounds quite a bit and it really paid off for him, even though he didn't ultimately learn to read phonetically.  My point is, that even if our litttles weren't learning to read phonetically, as babies, they ARE learning how to talk.  Diction is therefore very important- they are learning how to make the sounds that make up speech.  I use IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet), and it's great for any language because it clearly and universally isolates the sounds of any language and gives them a consistent symbol.  In LR, the girl voices are usually okay, not always, but the man voice is usually off unfortunately.

Yep.  I skip over the word split section, especially when a letter is isolated.  When it's separated correctly by syllable, such as in "rain-bow", I let it play because I do see value in learning how to chunk words.

[lelask]

This is quite annoying to learn that there are mistakes as I am using it to teach english and also present it as the best tool to teach english to young children.
Some of the splits sounded strange to me too but since english is not my first language I assumed that LR knows better. And nobody mentioned mistakes before.

[KL]

Hi all!

Thanks for all your feedback. We've had this brought up before and we thought we addressed it each time. Sorry if we missed out any.

The split, rightly or wrongly, was deliberately done that way. 

The first thing to understand is our general mentality - we don't necessarily follow tradition or convention just because it's tradition or convention. If we did, LR would be very different than what it is in almost all respects, and you would see us, for example, teaching the alphabet and letter sounds in Day 1, Session 1, Lesson 1.  LM and LMs would also be very very different.  When we design our products, we design from ground up, in ways that (again, rightly or wrongly) make more sense to us, and in ways that in our very subjective opinion would be more helpful for the baby/toddler.

The second thing to realize is that Word Split is used to highlight constituents of a word to help a child understand that a word is made up of different parts that make different sounds (unlike eg., a Chinese character), as well as highlighting grammar concepts. So sometimes we use it to highlight syllables, sometimes the starting consonant (or blends) of words, sometimes to highlight singular/plural, etc. etc.  It's whatever we want the child to pay attention to.

Regarding syllables specifically, we had a long debate as we were doing the split whether to strictly follow convention, or not.  The main question we asked ourselves was, what way would be more helpful for the child in breaking up a word, and we decided to split it the way we have done.  Again, we are aware that many would consider this to be 'wrong' as it does not follow convention or custom, and we can probably argue till the cows come home as to which would make more sense to a child.

Speaking of cows, regarding b/ird and c/ow, the lesson here is to understand the beginning syllables b and c respectively.  I'm not sure I understand why you would not want to teach a child that 'b' makes a 'buh' sound and 'c' a 'cuh' sound.  Perhaps someone can explain that to me.

In any case, here's what can be done:

1. You edit the splits to suit your liking (actually, the ability for you to do this was one reason why we decided to depart from convention, but with the new LR system where editing features are now not automatically included, this becomes more of an issue.)

2. We can re-issue the curriculum to strictly follow convention, though it would probably be very helpful to get input from you all to make sure we haven't left out anything.

Please let us know what you think! 

KL

[Tamsyn]

It's the "uh" in "buh" that we don't like.  "B" says "b".  That sound is easier to isolate in a word like "cab" than "bird", if that's helpful.  If "B" said "buh", and "D" said "duh", a word like "bird" would be pronounced "buh-ir-duh".  The common way of teaching reading by phonics used to involve sounding words out like that, "buh- irrrr-  duh", said faster and faster until it somehow magically switched to sound like "bird".  It was confusing to kids because the "uh" wasn't there any more.  Now there has been a movement to change and strictly isolate only the actual sound a letter really makes, with no "uh" sound.  While we're on the topic, "Qu" sounds like "coo", and "W" says "oo" as in "tool".  If you listen to the woman speaker in LR, she usually pronounces the letter sounds like this.

Having said all that, it's ultimately probably not that big of a deal.  Just as tiny children can intuit phonetic rules, they can also intuit where sounds like this don't fit in.  I learned to read the old way, and I didn't even realize I had learned it "wrong" until I took some teaching instruction classes at a homeschool convention.

[mybabyian]

I thought I was the only one bothered by this.  I think a change would be great!  Probably babies would still learn as it is. I just think it would be better if it was correct.  I think the best way to understand as far as the "uh" is concerned is to compare similar letters (phonemes?)  Some should be pronounced with sound coming from the vocal cords and some with sound only coming from the mouth.  Compare B and P.  Your mouth makes the same movements to produce these sounds.  The difference is with B you make sound with your voice and with P you don't.  Your lips do the same thing though. You can also compare D and T; G and C.  I think its actually impossible not to say "uh" ( or some other vowel sound) with the letters that use your voice but the "uh" should be as minimal as possible and there should be no "uh" at all with letters that do not use the voice as in C.  The mans voice in LR always gets it wrong.   The child's voice I think usually vets it right.  I did delete the man's voice on LR.  It was a little bit of a hassle and then we ended up using the ipad and you can't edit on the ipad.  So I vote for a correction if that's a possibility. Thank you!!!!

[CVMomma]

I agree with Tamsym and Mybabyian, pronouncing "uh" after a voiced consonant can be confusing. Anyway, it can be confusing to an older child trying to learn to read by a phonetic method. Maybe it isn't confusing to our LOs. It didn't seem to confuse my oldest dd. I can let you know in a year or so if it was confusing to my youngest.     

Most of the time the woman speaker gets it right, and most of the time the man speaker mispronounces it. Also, there is a phonetic rule that says something like "a vowel at the end of a syllable is usually long"  So table should be divided ta-ble, but faster should not be divided after the a. It should be divided after the t, fast-er.  Most of the time now I end up reading the word split, as well as the phonics sessions, to my baby.

My guess is you could change nothing and the LOs would still learn to read just fine. It might be easier on some older kids or ESL students though if changes were made.

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