Support for Reading Teachers and Parents

Click here for a very rich web-site which links to an inventory of all the ways that English’s 45 sounds can be represented in writing.

Written language is just a system of writing down sounds. All words are composed of one or more sounds, and every language has developed a more or less logical way of representing those sounds by various symbols. Unfortunately, the system used for the English language is not as regular as it is for most other languages. Although there are 45 sounds, there are only 26 letters - meaning that some sounds have to be represented by combinations of letters. Most sounds can be represented in several different ways: for example, the inventory lists 17 different ways of representing the /oo/ (as in the word “moon”) sound. It gets worse. Many letters can represent several different sounds (for example, the letter ‘y’ in yes, key, happy, boy, gym, sky, type, they, and day.  As a result of this complexity, many students need to be taught very, very carefully.

In addition to the inventory, the site contains many other resources, including a tool that allows teachers to focus on only one pattern at a time, generating word lists of both nonsense and actual words. This is useful for teaching both reading and spelling.

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