Whose Phonemes Are We Mapping?

This is the type of guidance given to teachers to support the teaching of reading and spelling through word mapping.

What is missing?

When teachers see a simple CVC word such as pan, they assume the sounds are straightforward.

The phonics programme will usually include resources that provide the sounds, for example, for use on a whiteboard while the graphemes are shown.

The teacher may have been trained to say a specific sound while holding up a card displaying the grapheme.

So, when teachers see pan, they think of the sounds they have been told to associate with the graphemes in the early stages, before introducing the concept that graphemes can represent other sounds.

It seems logical. These are the expected sounds.

Programmes outline the expected phonemes, and teachers read and write words using those ‘standard’ sounds.

Pan would be mapped as ‹p› ‹a› ‹n›, representing the phonemes /p/ /æ/ /n/.

But what if, even in the first few weeks, when the focus in a synthetic phonics programme is often on ‹s›, ‹a›, ‹t›, ‹p›, ‹i› and ‹n›, some Australian children don’t use those sounds when saying ‘SATPIN’ words, especially words such as ant, tan, pan, Stan and pant?

In England, the DfE states that teachers should account for variations in accent. The Australian Curriculum also recognises that different accents and dialects are used in Australia.

But are teachers given guidance when a child’s accent changes those phonemes? Do they know how to determine the phonemes in the child’s pronunciation and map them to the graphemes, which may also change when the phonemes change? And do they relate that mapping to the pronunciation modelled by the phonics programme?

It is time to talk about these issues and establish a Word Mapping Standard that gives teachers consistent guidance for mapping words while accounting for differences in children’s accents and pronunciations.