Page 3 - ABCTE Study Guide_Neat

Answer

The correct answer is D. If it can be uttered, it’s composed of one or more phonemes, plain and
simple. Choice A, grapheme, is the written representation of a phoneme, and is usually the letter (or
letters) that make that sound. If the grapheme contains two letters, then it is a diagraph—choice C.
Choice B, morpheme, is the smallest unit of a word that has meaning. You’ll find out more about
morphemes in a minute.

Every little sound of every word ever spoken in any language is a phoneme, though each language
makes use of a different number of phonemes in order to say what they need to say. For instance,
our Spanish speaking friends have no problem trilling their “r”s, as the trilled “r” is an important
Spanish-language phoneme. Many English speakers, however, find it difficult to produce a trilled “r,”
as evidenced by our onetime fascination with repeating a declaration that such-and-such national
brand of potato chips has “rrrridges.”

While it may seem clear that graphemes match up perfectly with their respective phonemes, English
is a weird language. Consider this group of graphemes:

ghoti

Of course, this is an extreme example, and goes against all our spelling conventions, but this group of
graphemes could represent the animal in this picture:

Here's how:

gh represents the phoneme /f/, as in the word enough

o represents the phoneme /i/, as in the word women

ti represents the phoneme /sh/, as in the word nation

Why spend so much time and effort on phonemes when most people haven’t even heard of
them?

Keep in mind that we’re talking about “phonemic awareness.” The “awareness” part is key because
our short-term goal is to make students conscious of the fact that language is made up of a finite
number of phonemes. They can recognize these phonemes, distinguish one from the next, break
them apart, and make new words by switching one or more phonemes for others. Once kids have
mastered the complexities of onset and rime, syllabication, and phoneme segmentation, they’re
ready to match those familiar sounds to the letters that represent them; and, of course, that will
determine whether they’ll be successful readers and, consequently, successful students.