Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Zed]

I use some 3 letter nonsense phonics cards to teach reading/phonics to some 7-9 year old students. One of the sets of cards that I use ends with 'at'. So you have 'bat, cat, dat, fat.....'. This generally works well and I have the anticipated problems like mispronunciation of short 'i' as long 'e' when I choose the 'ig' ending cards for example. What I'm hoping someone can tell me is why about 30-40% of my students do fine with this until they get to 'n' and then they change the order of the word. Like this ... 'kat, lat, mat, ant, pat...'. I thought they were following a rhythm but where 'ant' comes from I don't know. Is there some language interference problem here that I don't know about? (Also happens with 'ix' cards).

[Son Deureo!]

I have a guess. They don't recognize "nat" as a word, and rightly so, so they are probably trying to guess that the word is supposed to be the English word "ant", which they have probably seen or heard somewhere before. It comes up a lot in the pre-school texts.

In other words, they're using a whole word approach to guess what the word is supposed to be instead of a phonetic approach.

[Zed]

I hadn't considered that. That's a possibility, however, these kids mispronounce 'ten' and 'sun' in the same context so I'm not sure that they would recognize 'ant' when they don't recognize those. Anyway, it's an interesting idea.

[katydid]

Do they know how to pronounce oat? I saw you left that one out, and am wondering if that would throw them off as well.

[Zed]

I leave out all the vowels plus q and x at the beginning. I'm just trying to get them to practice the different consonant sounds at the beginning and stressing the proper pronunciation of the short vowel in the middle so I would leave out things that would change the pronunciation of the short vowel. I also leave out the c when I use an e or i in the middle since I'm not ready to deal with short and hard c with them. I always have them pronounce the g as a hard letter so I avoid patterns where it would be soft. (I don't have cards for ~em for example)