Here are some tips for helping Spanish-speaking English Learners when working on vowels.
As with all literacy instruction for English learners, the supports needed will depend on the students’ literacy proficiency in their home language, and their literacy and oral language proficiency in English. The less proficient students are in oral English, the more support they will need. That’s because the purpose of teaching sound-letter associations and decoding skills is to facilitate word recognition – and you can’t recognize words you don’t know, even if you can decode them.
If your students already have literacy skills in Spanish, they likely understand the basic idea that letters represent sounds. Explain that English uses the same five vowels (vocales, or the singular vocal, in Spanish) — ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i', ‘o’, ‘u’ — but that reading in English is more complicated. In Spanish, each vowel is associated with only one sound, or phoneme. In English, the vowels can represent different sounds — or no sound at all — depending on the other letters in the word.
Since each vowel in Spanish orthography represents one and only one sound, there are only five vowel sounds in Spanish. In English, there are about 20 vowel sounds!
Students who know how to read in Spanish and are learning to read in English will need to associate letters sounds in English with letters they already know – but with different, although sometimes similar, sounds. As a result, students’ prior knowledge can initially interfere with learning the new skills.
Overall, however, being literate in your home language is a big advantage in becoming literate in your second language. Many skills and understandings transfer from one language to another. It’s usually helpful if teachers point this out to students, since they might not realize it on their own.
Discriminating between the different vowel sounds in English will be a challenge for many English Learners. Teaching the meanings of the words they’re learning to read, in addition to how to read and spell them, can help. For example:
Write bit and beat on two cards. (If students haven’t yet been taught the ‘ea’ vowel team, that’s no problem – students just need to recognize visually that the medial graphemes differ.)
Define each word and show an illustration for each. Use each word in a sentence as you hold up the appropriate card, e.g., “The dog bit the man” and “The man beat the dog in a race.” Be sure students understand the meanings of the sentences, particularly the target words bit and beat.
Have students say each sentence with you.
Then flash each card in random order and have the student read the word, correctly articulating the medial vowel sound. Start slowly, making sure the student can articulate each vowel sound so that the sounds are at least distinguishable, if not perfect.
After several rounds of correctly reading and articulating the words, end by asking, “What did the dog do?” The student should answer “He bit the man” or “The dog bit him,” clearly articulating bit. Then what did the man do? “He beat the dog in a race” or “He beat him.”
Going a step further, ask the questions and have students answer by pointing to the correct word.
If students are learning to read for the first time, and it’s in English, the task is the same as for English speakers. Teachers should follow the general guidelines for teaching vowels, with these two modifications:
Be very clear with your instructions and use extra modeling. Be sure students understand directions for engaging in activities and completing work. Teacher modeling will be extremely helpful, as will be seeing other students engage in the tasks.
Teach students the words you'll use to teach and illustrate foundational skills. For instance, when using pictures or objects to represent a letter name or sound (like octopus for the short 'o' sound), make sure your ELs can pronounce the words and understand their meaning. You might use flash cards with keyword pictures. In addition to helping all children remember the letters and sounds, this will contribute to your English Learners' oral-language development, which in turn will promote their literacy development.
Students who have no literacy skills in their home language will not have any sound-letter knowledge to contrast (or interfere) with sound-letter knowledge in English. However, articulation challenges as above will still exist, such as confusion between the short ‘i’ in bit and the long ‘e’ in beat.
Instances of similar phonemes but different graphemes are useful for teachers to know when instructing Spanish speakers who are learning to read for first time and it’s in English. For example, the short ‘e’ in bed is pronounced like the /ĕ/ sound in ‘bebé’: The letter ‘e’ represents the same (and only) ‘e’ sound in Spanish as it does in English (/ĕ/) when it appears in a consonant-vowel-consonant word. Here are a few more examples:
The long ‘e’ sound in beat is like the first sound in hijo.
The Spanish ‘u’ phoneme in uno is the same as the English phoneme /oo/ in boot. (Note that foot is a different phoneme.)
The long ‘u’ in cute exists in Spanish words such as viuda (widow) and ciudad (city).
The point of transfer here is the similarity between English and Spanish phonemes. Spanish graphemes (letters) cannot be a point of transfer since the learner has no Spanish literacy skills.
