Students often get stuck blending and segmenting medial vowels, in particular short vowel /a/ and /e/. How do you recommend teaching these?

When we pronounce phonemes in isolation, they can sound different to how they sound in words. We know that vowel pronunciation, and being able to identify vowels within words is always a tricky thing for students. Phonemes such as /a/ in words like can or jam, can sound different in isolation to how they sound in words. This makes blending, or isolating the sound tricky for children (especially if the student is from an EALD background).

Remember that isolating phonemes is not something the brain does naturally, nor something we were born to do. It is a skill need to read in languages that have an alphabetic code.

Lots of explicit teacher modelling, repetition and practice will help the brain to orthographically map. Easier if the word is in your lexicon.

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