Every syllable has a vowel
15 Phonics Rules for Reading and Spelling
When kids and adults learn to read, they’re connecting how words sound to how those sounds are represented by letters. Phonics instruction helps make those connections.
Phonics instruction also teaches spelling patterns and spelling rules. It teaches about parts of words called syllables. Learning common syllable patterns can help people become better readers and spellers.
To thrive in both reading and spelling, here are 15 important rules to know.
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Reading and writing
1. Vowels in syllables
Every syllable of every word must have at least one vowel sound. A vowel can stand alone in a syllable, as in u•nit and an•i•mal. It can also be surrounded by consonants, as in jet, nap•kin, and fan•tas•tic.
2. Short and long vowels
Vowels can make different sounds. The sounds they make depend on where they are in a word. For example, is the vowel followed by a consonant? This helps determine if the vowel makes its short or long sound: go vs. got, she vs. shed, hi vs. him.
When there’s only one vowel in a syllable and it is followed by at least one consonant, the vowel usually makes its short sound. Examples include on, itch, mas•cot, and Wis•con•sin. This pattern is called a “closed syllable” because the consonant “closes in” the short vowel sound.
When there is only one vowel and it is at the end of a syllable, the vowel makes its long sound, as in he and ban•jo. This pattern is called an “open syllable.”
3. Silent e
When e is the last letter in a word, and there’s only one other vowel in that syllable, the first vowel in that syllable is usually long and the e is silent, as in sale and in•side. This syllable pattern is called “vowel-consonant-e.”
Some teachers call this the “silent e” rule. Some call it the “magic e” rule. The e gives all its power to the other vowel and makes that vowel use its long sound (“say its name”).
4. Consonant blends and digraphs
Digraph is a fancy word for two letters that represent one sound. In a digraph made of consonants, the two consonants work together to form a new sound. Examples include chap, ship, thin, whiz, and photo. Consonant blends are different. These groups of two or more consonants work together. But unlike digraphs, their individual sounds can still be heard as they’re blended together. Examples include clam, grasp, and scrub.
5. Vowel digraphs
In a vowel digraph, two vowels are side by side. The first vowel is long and says its name. The second vowel is silent, as in boat, paint, and beach.
Sometimes, two vowels work together to form a new sound. This is called a diphthong. Examples include cloud and boil.
6. R-controlled vowels
When a syllable has a vowel that is followed by r, the vowel is “controlled” by the r and makes a new sound.
Examples include car, bird, germ, form, and hurt. This rule is sometimes called “bossy r” because the r “bosses” the vowel to make a new sound.
7. The “schwa” sound
Any vowel can make the schwa sound; it sounds like a weak uh or ih. Words like from and final have the schwa sound. Some words have more than one schwa sound, like apartment and banana. It’s the most common sound in the English language.
8. Soft c and hard c, and soft g and hard g
When the letter c is followed by the vowels e, i, or y, it usually makes its soft sound. Examples of that are cent, circus, and cyclone. With other vowels, the letter c makes a hard sound, as in cat and cot.
Likewise, when the letter g is followed by the vowels e, i, or y, it usually makes its soft sound. Examples of that are gel, giant, and gym.
With other vowels, the letter g makes a hard sound, as in gas, gorilla, and yogurt.
9. The “fszl” (fizzle) rule
The letters f, s, z, and l are usually doubled at the end of a one-syllable word immediately following a short vowel. Examples include stuff, grass, fuzz, and shell. Exceptions include quiz and bus.
10. Ending in k or ck
When a one-syllable word ends with the /k/ sound immediately following a short vowel, it’s usually spelled with ck, as in duck and trick. When the /k/ sound follows a consonant, long vowel sound, or diphthong, it’s usually spelled with k, as in task, cake, soak, and hawk.
11. The /j/ sound and the /ch/ sound
In a one-syllable word, when a /j/ sound immediately follows a short vowel, it’s spelled dge as in badge, hedge, bridge, dodge, and smudge.
(The d “protects” the vowel from the “magic e” rule.)
In a one-syllable word, when a /ch/ sound immediately follows a short vowel, it’s usually spelled tch as in catch, fetch, stitch, blotch, and clutch. The exceptions to this rule are such, much, rich, and which.
12. Drop the e with -ing
When words end with a silent e, drop the e before adding -ing. Examples: bike/biking, give/giving, and dodge/dodging. This rule also applies to other suffixes that start with vowels, like -ed, -er, -able, and -ous. Examples: grieve/grievous, excite/excitable, and hope/hoped.
13. Doubling
In a one-syllable word like win where one short vowel is followed by one consonant, double the consonant before adding a suffix that starts with a vowel. Examples: winner, winning, winnable.
14.
PluralsFor most words, add s to make them plural, as in cat/cats. But when a singular word ends with s, sh, ch, x, or z, add es to make it plural, as in classes, brushes, and foxes.
15. Y rules
To make plural a word that ends in a vowel immediately followed by y, just add s, as in toy/toys. When y immediately follows a consonant, change the y to i and add es. Examples: family/families, pony/ponies, and treaty/treaties.
Suffixes follow a similar set of y rules. When there’s a vowel right before y, keep the y and simply add the suffix. Examples include play/playing and annoy/annoying.
When a word ends with a consonant followed immediately by y, change the y to i before adding suffixes like -ed and -est. Examples include carry/carried and happy/happiest.
But when the suffix begins with i, keep the y and simply add the suffix, as in fly/flying and baby/babyish.
Exceptions to the rules
Most words in the English language follow phonics rules. But any exceptions to these rules need to be taught and memorized for reading and spelling. These words are often found on lists of sight words or high-frequency words.
If your child is struggling with reading or spelling, talk to the teacher. An extra scoop of phonics instruction could help your child catch up. You may also want to learn about reading specialists and reading interventions, which are common resources schools use to help struggling readers.
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Reading and writing
» Consonant syllables
» Consonant syllables
Learning the building blocks of words - sounds, their spellings, and word parts
5 Replies
Every English syllable must contain a vowel, right?
Like everything in English spelling, there are a couple of exceptions to this “rule”.
It’s handy to know what they are, in case a very smart learner asks you about them.
Knowing about these exceptions will probably also make you careful about making sweeping generalisations like the one above. Kids generally don’t like being told things that aren’t precisely true. And actually, neither do you or I.
Consonant syllables with no vowel sound
Try saying the words “button” and “bottle” and thinking carefully about what happens between the “t” sound and the “n” in “button” or the “l” in “bottle”.
Often, nothing happens in between. We just segue straight from the “t” to the “n” or “l”, and don’t actually say a vowel in the last syllable at all.
The same thing happens in words like “golden” and “needle”. They’re effectively consonant syllables. We can say them with a vowel, but we usually don’t, unless we’re talking to the Queen or went to a Swiss finishing school, or generally have tickets on ourselves and like to express this linguistically.
Now try saying the sounds “t”, “d”, “l” and “n” one after another, and thinking about where your tongue is. All four of these sounds require you to put your tongue tip on the little ridge behind your teeth, called the alveolar ridge.
Because your tongue is already in the right spot after a “t” or a “d” to say “l” and “n”, and because “l” and “n” are vowel-like consonants, after a “t” or “d”, we tend to just go straight into an “l” or “n” and use it as the last syllable, and not bother saying a vowel.
However, we still use a vowel letter when we spell these syllables (i.e. we don’t write “buttn”, “bottl”, “goldn” or “needl”), so unless a learner notices there is no vowel sound in these syllables, it’s probably not worth raising this yourself.
But once kids get very aware of sounds in words, they can ask some pretty tricky questions, so it’s good to be prepared. Also, it’s good to avoid grand generalisations like “every single English syllable, without exception, always has a vowel”.
Saying stuff like that is just asking to be found out.
Consonant syllables with no vowel letter
Words like “prism” and “logarithm”, “sarcasm” and “feminism” (see a longer list here) have their last syllable spelt with a single “m”, with no vowel letter.
The sound “m” is made with both lips, and the other English sounds made in this location are “p” and “b”.
I can’t find any words that segue straight from “p” or “b” to a final-syllable “m”. Most of the words in this group end in “ism”.
When you move your mouth from saying the “s” in “ism” to saying the “m”, you can’t really help but say a little vowel sound. Vowels are, in simple terms, when you open your mouth/vocal tract, and consonants are when you close it down. Shifting from one consonant position to another while vocalising invariably involves a bit of opening your vocal tract, and thus vowel-saying.
The brains trust behind English spelling decided to spell these words ending with “m” with no vowel letter for etymological reasons, related to the spelling of what were originally Greek words.
The “ism” from these then got tacked on as a suffix to additional words, like “alcohol” and “American”.
Teach patterns, not rules
Instead of telling learners that there is a hard-and-fast rule that every English syllable contains a vowel sound and a vowel spelling, try saying something like, “There are a few, longer words that have syllables that don’t contain a vowel sound or a vowel letter, but generally every word and every syllable has a vowel sound, which we write with a vowel spelling”.
Using a movable alphabet that has the vowels in one colour and the consonants in another can really help, because then you can say e.g. “you can’t usually have a word/syllable without an orange (vowel) spelling”.
However, the usual 26-letter movable alphabet set can confuse more than it helps, unless you know how to use it well, because many letters are used for both vowel and consonant spellings, e.g.
- “y” as in “yes” versus “y” as in “by”, “gym”, “baby”, “say”, “they” and “boy”,
- “r” as in “rat” versus “r” as in “car”, “her”, “sir”, “for” and “turn”,
- “w” as in “wet” versus “w” as in “saw”, “chew” and “cow”.
To really demonstrate all the patterns you need a movable alphabet that contains major spellings, not just letters, and has the vowel spellings in one colour and the consonants another, such as this one you can make yourself (as one mum said to me, “this is not just speech therapy, it’s craft!”).
If you don’t want to/can’t make your own, the Smartkids magnetic alphabets look reasonably good, though I don’t really understand their colour-coding, and they lump together digraphs (like “ck”, “ll” and “ng”, where two letters represent one sound) and blends (like “br”, “sm” and “nk”, where two letters represent two sounds), whereas I think we should be teaching blending, not blends (see this previous blog post for why).
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Personal site - What is a syllable?
What is a syllable? How to divide a word into syllables?
Theoretical knowledge (for parents):
A syllable is a vowel or a combination of one or more consonants with a vowel.
There are as many syllables in a word as there are vowels. Words can be one syllable (one-syllable), two (two-syllable), three (three-syllable) and polysyllabic.
In the word the creak has one vowel sound [And], therefore, the word creak consists of one syllable, it is monosyllabic.
A syllable that ends in a vowel is called open ; a syllable that ends in a consonant is called closed .
Open syllables: MA, PI, E, CHTE. The word a - y - di - that - ri - i consists only of open syllables.
Closed syllables: AK, GOR, FOX, PAIN.
Open syllables are the most common in Russian. Therefore, words are more often divided into syllables ending in a vowel sound: co-ro-va .
If the consonant Y is before another consonant, then it refers to the first syllable: mai-ka, lei-ka, shai-ba .
If in combination of two consonants the first sonorant ([P], [P , ], [L], [L , ], [M], [M , ], [N], [N , ], then it refers to the first syllable, making it closed: part-ta, bronze-za, kol-ba, verb-ba .
However, in school practice, the principles of syllable division are usually not considered in detail, and it is considered acceptable more free division into syllables: ko-shka - kosh-ka , pair - par-ta .
How to explain to a child what a syllable is?
Parent: Can the chocolate be cut into pieces?
Child: You can.
Parent: Can an orange be cut into slices?
Child: You can.
Parent: The word can also be divided into pieces.
Write the word "boar" on a piece of paper.
Cut the word "boar" into 2 parts:
| KA |
| BAN |
How many letters did you underline? | 3 |
| loaves |
5) Check if the number of syllables matches the number indicated above the word.
6) Check that each syllable has a vowel and only one.
Vowel sounds and letters. How many are there in Russian?
We will teach you how to write without errors and tell stories in an interesting way
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The correct pronunciation of words is one of the components of a beautiful and literate speech.
To achieve this, you will first have to study the sounds themselves. In this article, we will figure out together what vowel sounds are, how many vowels are in the alphabet of the Russian language, and what sounds they can represent.
What are vowels and sounds
Vowel sounds are those sounds that we freely convey with our voice. Hence their name comes from: voice means "voice". When pronouncing, air exits through the mouth and does not create noise, and the position of the tongue and lips determines which vowel sound we will pronounce.
There are much fewer vowels in Russian than consonants. There are 6 of them in total: [a], [o], [i], [s], [y] and [e]. To understand whether a vowel sound is in front of you or not, try to sing it. For example:
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a-a-a ,
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woo
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ss .
If it works, then the sound is a vowel. You can't do that with consonants.
There are more vowels than sounds - there are 10 of them: a, i, u, u, o, e, e, e, i, s . This difference is due to the fact that some of these letters can represent two sounds and are pronounced using a combination of a vowel and a consonant [y']. For example, in word spruce the letter e expresses two sounds - [y'] and [e]. Let's look at the table all the vowel sounds and the letters that represent them.
| Letter | Sound | Example |
|---|---|---|
| a | [a] | pharmacy |
| i | [a] [d'] + [a] | change anchor |
| y | [y] | moon |
| [y] [y'] + [y] | love skirt | |
| about | [o] [a] | horse milk |
| e | [e] [y'] + [e] [and] | victory raccoon great |
| e | [o] [d'] + [o] | rope hedgehog |
| e | [e] | evolution |
| and | [and] [s] | caviar life |
| s | [s] | choice |
Demo lesson in Russian
Take the test at the introductory lesson and find out what topics separate you from the "five" in Russian.
How vowel sounds are related to syllables
Vowel sounds form syllables - sound segments of words that we pronounce with one breath. One syllable can be either a vowel with one or more consonants, or a vowel alone. There is even a rule by which syllables can be counted: how many vowels in a word - so many syllables.
For example, in the word journey there are 5 vowels: [u], [i], [e], [i] and [e]. This means that it has 5 syllables: p-te-she-stvi-e .
Test yourself!
Count the number of syllables in the words: try on, tanner, well-groomed, care, prefix, capital, wet, invitation, orange .
Vowel sounds and stress
Now let's see what groups vowel sounds are divided into. Sometimes their pronunciation depends on whether the stress falls on them, that is, whether we single them out with our voice. So vowel sounds are divided into stressed and unstressed.
Here are some examples:
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Stress in Russian can fall on any of the existing vowel sounds. However, only 4 of them can be unstressed - these are [a], [i], [y] and [s]. In this position, we pronounce sounds weaker than under stress, because of which they can change qualities and sound differently.
Interestingly, the vowels [o] and [e] can only be stressed. There are only a couple of exceptions to this rule: for example, in words cocoa and canoe sounds [o] and [e] in an unstressed position.
How unstressed vowels are related to consonants
How an unstressed vowel sounds depends on the consonant that precedes it. Or rather, from its hardness or softness. If it is a hard consonant, it can be followed by unstressed vowels [y], [a] and [s]. When we talk about a soft consonant, it is followed by unstressed vowels [y] and [and].
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Test yourself
It's time to find out if you now understand well what vowel sounds are in Russian.
To do this, we have prepared tasks for self-examination.
Task 1
List all the vowels in these words:
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squeal,
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fair,
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rejoice,
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doll,
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distant,
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buddy,
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voting,
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mirror,
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story,
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OK,
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captivate.
Task 2
Name 5 words each in which the sounds [a], [i], [y] and [s] would be stressed.
Task 3
Name 5 words in which an unstressed vowel would come after a hard consonant, and 5 more words where it would follow a soft consonant.
Task 4
Count the number of syllables in the words below (don't forget to use the rule you learned at the beginning of the article!):
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weightless,
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sunrise,
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adventure,
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painter,
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perpetuate,
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nice,
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image,
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category,
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fun,
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melting,
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snowflake.
