Question about "future"

瑜珈

Q:  Could anybody tell me how to do "culture"? How do I explain "ture"to my daughter? "T,U,R" is not the sound it comes out. I also have problem with "fortune".

A:  Great question!  When we’re teaching our children how to spell, we have to be careful that we don’t try to go from speech to spelling. While quite often, the sounds of speech will match the phonograms—or at least closely match—there are times when there is not a direct connection. As one of our members said just today, if we were to include every nuance of every sound in our language, we would end up with a stack of cards probably five or six times what we have with our 70 basic phonograms.

To teach spelling using the phonogram approach, we start with the spelling and think of the sounds in the word as though they were pure and unrelated to the sounds around them.

For example, the vowel A sounds different in the words bank and cat. Why is that? The sounds of /k/ and /t/ don’t really affect the /a/ sound much in the word cat. We can hear a clear short vowel sound there.  However, when we’re saying the /a/ in bank, the tongue is actually moving from it’s normal placement for that vowel up and back to get ready for the /k/ sound that is coming at the end of the word. In fact, this movement causes the /n/ sound (a nasal sound made in the front of the mouth) to trade places with the /ng/ sound (another nasal made in the back of the mouth) because the /ng/ is made right where the /k/ will be made. The mouth has found a very convenient and efficient way to sequence those sounds. The result is that the vowel A doesn’t sound like a short vowel /a/, but instead takes on more of a flavor of the long vowel /A/. This is because /A/ is produced with a higher tongue placement, further back in the mouth. So we see that in words like bank we don’t get pure phonogram sounds, but rather the sounds within words are affected by the sounds around them, or by the tongue’s movement from one sound in the word to another.


Now let’s look at your question words.  You have two words that end in “ture” and “tune” and you’re hearing /cher/ and /chUn/. Why do we hear that, and how do we explain that we hear one thing but we spell it another way?

When the tongue moves quickly in speech from the /t/ to the /U/ sound (/tyoo/), it causes what sounds to our ear like the /ch/ sound. It’s a complicated movement. Try saying it several times quickly. You’ll notice the /ch/ sound making its way into what you’re saying. Yes, you can say it slowly and clearly hear the two sounds, but people typically talk quickly, and our tongues have to keep up with our speech. The result is a tongue that tries desperately to conserve energy or movements wherever possible. For “ture” and “tune” the tongue just makes the /ch/ sound to simplify a process that in fast speech resembles that sound anyway.

So now how do we teach this to our children for spelling? We simply tell them the word, use it in a sentence, say the word again, and then we tell them how to think to spell it.  

We think to spell /for/ /tUn/ but we say /for/ /chUn/.
We think to spell /kul/ /tUr/ but we say /kul/ /cher/.

The goal is to teach in such a way that the student can lock in on the phonograms that they’ll use for spelling. I always tell my kids that if they try to sound it out for spelling the way it comes out of the mouth, they’ll be in trouble. After we’re done with the dictation process, I’d ask a student to tell me what’s different about the way we spell it compared to the way we say it. The student would say they hear a /ch/ sound when it’s really spelled TU. I’d congratulate him because now he knows what he has to practice saying when he’s working on that word that week so that he’ll remember the correct spelling.

By the way, this same process plays out other sound combinations places as well.  For example, why do we say /sher/ for the word sure? We don’t teach the kids that S says /sh/, but in sure or sugar we hear the /sh/ sound.  It’s exactly the same thing that’s happening with /tU/. The /sh/ sound slips in there when the tongue is moving from the /s/ to the /U/ (syoo), so it simplifies it to just simply saying /sher/ or /shoo/ /ger/.  We teach the word with the “think to spell” and we say it however we say it.

Hope that helps,
Liz FitzGerald
Endorsed SWR Trainer, Northern CA
SWR List Moderator
http://www.swrtraining.com
http://www.facebook.com/SWRTraining
http://www.8thdimensionthebook.com

bin9420

太棒了，su tu等等类似的词语这样解释就容易多了，小孩也更容易理解