Here's my two cents... just my opinion based on my training and experience...
You're right... differentiating between a bunch of English vowels, but
especially /i/ as in "igloo" and /e/ as in "echo" is difficult, particularly
for non-native speakers. I mostly work with native Spanish speakers, and most
kids have a hard time hearing this difference. Spanish only has 5 vowels,
while English, depending on which accent you use, has 12 or 13!
Differentiating between the "short" i and e is close to impossible without
either more immersion in the language or specific training.
It sounds like this is a perception issue to me. Is that true? If you put a
pin and a pen on the desk and ask this child to give you one or the other,
would she reliably know which one you asked for? If so, teaching the
letter/sound correspondence won't do much good, because those sounds literally
seem the same to the child. (BTW, with my accent, "egg" starts with a "long a"
sound. Echo, for me, is a much better choice.)
I think you've got some good suggestions to help the child along in
perception. Whisper phones, sorts that may start to help the child
differentiate the sounds, actually having the child play with tongue placement
and see how the "short" i is produced differently (the front of the tongue is
higher), etc. may help. But honestly, I think the best remedy is time and
immersion in language. Until the child can perceive the difference in sound, I
don't see how she'll be able to produce the sound differently when reading
aloud.
Now, if this is not a perception issue... if this girl can reliably tell you
which is a pen and which is a pin with no problem, then yeah, I think you can
teach her which sounds correspond to which letters via sorts and rhymes/chants
and kinesthetic activities and all that; activities that help kids to remember
which sounds generally correspond to which letters.
BTW, I have a little comic strip that pokes a little bit of fun at the
"long/short" vowel distinction. It shows a limo saying, "I'm a Long O" (as in
"poke") a little VW Bug saying "I'm a short O" (as in "pot"), then a smallish
sedan saying, "I'm a family-sized, compact o" (as in "book"), and a larger
Cadillac-type car saying,"I'm full-sized o" (as in "room"). Truth be told,
there is nothing "long" or "short" about these sounds. They're just sounds.
But I think that if we can categorize them, sometimes that can help kids. My
kids have been helped by the term "short vowel" specifically (I don't teach the
"long vowel" term, though). It makes sense to them to call this class of
vowels "short" because they are usually spelled in a short way (one letter).
But I think it's easy to teach kids the letter/sound correspondence aspect of
reading in many different ways, and really, whether we choose to teach kids the
"long/short" labels may matter much less than we think it
does. :-)
Anyway, sorry this ended up being so long, but thanks for allowing me to jump
in!
~Stacy
>I am currently tutoring a first grade student who is
having
>>> difficulty
>>> with her vowel sounds, especially /e/. She sometimes
confuses the
/e/
>>> sound with /a/ or /i/. When I ask her to spell a word like
?met?
she
>>> would spell ?mat?, and when I asked her to sound it out
she would
>>> sound out met. I know ?e? is one of the most difficult
vowels
because
>>> it sounds so similar to the ?a? and ?i?.
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