OnTrack Reading

Many of you who work with struggling readers have no doubt noticed the way they often will read “what” for “that,” “when” for “then,” “who” for “how,” and vice versa.

I’ve dealt with a relatively large number of such children and have noticed two patterns to their confusion:

1. Most of the children who confuse these pairs of words usually can’t spell them, and

2. One member of the confused pair (or both) usually begins with “th” or “wh”, including the pair “the” and “a” which are often confused when reading aloud.

The Cause of the Problem

As I see the problem (besides the possibility that one or both of the “pairs” are taught as sight words) many phonics curricula are failing to teach the digraphs “th” and “wh” properly. The digraph “th” is often taught as just one sound, and the digraph “wh” is usually taught as representing two different sounds /w/ and /h/.

The Solution

Instead, I believe that as soon as a child is exposed to the “th” digraph, he should be told that it represents two sounds, the /th/ in “thing” and the voiced sound (which I represent here as /the/) in “that.” Taught in that manner, a child failing to decode “that” on the first attempt will know that there is another option for the “th” and is less likely to jump to a guess when he gets a nonsense word on the first attempt, that guess usually being “what.”

Similarly, when “wh” is encountered for the first time in the curriculum, a child should be taught that it represents a single sound, /hw/, which is different from the /h/ and /w/ sounds he has already been taught for the letters “h” and “w.” He need only be told that the sound of “wh” is the “blowing out a candle sound” which I represent here as /hw/. If you blow out a candle as you normally would, you are pronouncing the /hw/ sound. The sound is unvoiced like /h/, but lips are pursed to direct air forward. A child can also be shown that you cannot easily blow out a candle with either a /h/ sound (due to the lips not being pursed to direct air outward) or with a /w/ sound (due to the energy being used up by the voicing of the sound–vibrating the vocal cords.)

The Payoff

If taught that “wh” is one sound, and that it is neither /h/ nor /w/, it is not that difficult to then show him that not only can words like “when,” “where” and “what” be decoded using /hw/, but so can words like “who,” “whose” and “whole” (which most phonics curricula now teach as beginning with a /h/ sound.)

Explained in the above manner, the distinction between the initial sounds of the words “hole” and “whole” is mostly a matter of feeling where one’s lips are when the words are pronounced for spelling, a process that must be learned, i.e., a perfect pronunciation must be formed for words like “whole” and “who,” pursing the lips when sounding out these words for spelling. Furthermore, since most children who confuse these pairs do misspell them, it’s important to ensure that they do learn to spell them well before they are called upon to do a lot of reading.

Summarizing

As I see it then, many phonics curricula teach that the digraph “th” represents just one sound (by failing to teach the second sound) and the digraph “wh” represents two sounds (both already represented by a single basic code letter, either “h” or “w”), when really the reverse is true. That is, “th” should be taught as two sounds and “wh” as just one, a new one distinct from both “h” and “w.”

Because of the abundant presence of words with these characteristics in normal text, it’s important that the phonics information be carefully provided to beginning readers so that they understand the distinctions that are being made. When that is not done in a curriculum, children easily become confused by words beginning with “th” and “wh” and that is exactly when a teacher will fall back on the old, “Well, you’ll just have to memorize these, I guess,” and they’ll be added to the sight-word-teaching pile.

If you’ve been working your way through the Tidbits section of the Guide, the next page explains why reading curricula should present the spellings ar and or as digraphs.

Next: The Digraphs “ar” and “or”, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page.