Flexing the vowel is a great scaffold to support students who are struggling to decode words with the schwa sound. In teaching this we are also helping students to recognize how to be flexible in their decoding. When a word doesn't sound right with the expected vowel sound they will learn to try another sound, in this case, the schwa sound. This scaffold provides a flexible strategy that students can apply and self-correct independently.
Let's say you want your students to read the word dragon. They can first use their decoding skills to break it into two syllables and sound it out: drag-on.
They might say /drăg-ŏn/ … and they don't recognize it as a word in their vocabulary. This should be a metacognitive trigger to them to wonder about schwa.
And then you might go through these steps with the student:
You did a good job decoding that correctly. We have a schwa in the second syllable. Flex the 'o' to the /ĭ/ sound.
Let's read the word again, this time flexing the vowel to make it's schwa sound.
This exercise is called flexing the vowel. We've provided a scaffold for students by telling them where the schwa sound is in the word and what sound to substitute — /ŭ/ or /ĭ/ — to get to the right word.
This is something we want students to do independently as they encounter new words. Of course, this doesn't work if the word isn't in their vocabulary. For example, in the word method, if students read /meth-ŏd/ and try /meth-ŭd/ and /meth-ĭd/ they probably won't figure out the correct pronunciation if the word isn't part of their vocabulary. For students to be successful with schwa, they must have a strong vocabulary … or support from you (or a dictionary or the Internet).
For this reason, when you're first teaching schwa, you should use words that are part of your students' vocabulary. As you might expect, schwa will be more challenging for your English Learners as well.
