Short Vowels Practice Sets Version 2

The Struggle with Short Vowels

The ability to differentiate between short vowels and correctly and instantaneously identify them in words is fundamental to learning to read. When a student has dyslexia, a learning difficulty or has been subjected to bad, wrong, hurried or no teaching, they may struggle in telling the short vowels apart in both reading and spelling. When this student is also required to read and spell long vowels, vowel digraphs and vowel trigraphs, the confusion compounds and leads to high cognitive load and low confidence.

The problem is exacerbated by at least two other factors:

1. the fact that short and long vowels are misnomers in present-day English. The vowels were actually short and long in Old English much like the short and long vowels in Kannada (ಅ ಆ) and Hindi (अ आ). In present-day English, there’s nothing short about short vowels and nothing long about long vowels. They are just different vowels.
2. the names of the letters and the phonemes they represent:
   • <e> represents [ɛ] (set), but <i> represents [ɪ] (sit), which can sound very much like the name of <e>.
   • <a> represents [æ] (sat), but its name can sound very similar to the [ɛ] (set), represented by <e>
   • The first akshara in most Indian languages is closest to [ʌ] (umbrella) but short <a> is different.

The pattern I see with struggling readers is somewhat consistent. Most children pick up consonant grapheme-phoneme correspondences faster than vowel grapheme-phoneme correspondences (barring confusions such as the ones between <b> and <d>). They are also mostly comfortable with the short <a>, i.e., [æ] (as in apple) which is usually taught first. The struggle begins when other short vowels are added to the mix. Their struggle presents itself in different ways:

• They read other vowels as [æ] too. For example, they might read <set> as [sæt] (sat) instead of [sɛt] (set).
• They guess with all the vowel sounds they know. For example, they might try to read <set> as [sæt] (sat), [sɛt] (set), [sɪt] (sit), etc., and look at your facial expressions for a clue to choose one. They may also use pictures or other clues in the text to guess. The moment you notice the child is guessing, you know there is a problem that needs immediate attention.

What does a child struggling with short vowels benefit from?

What helps a child struggling with short vowels or any other aspect of learning to read is threefold:

1. patience, the ability of the adult to wait as long as it takes for the child to work out the differences, without frustration and hurry
2. practice, the opportunity to wrestle with the confusion regularly, preferably for a few short minutes every day instead of long stretches of time once in a while
3. reading materials that target their needs and build and support their learning and understanding systematically

Resources such as the Merrill Linguistic Readers or Phonics Pathways partially address (3). The short vowels practice sets are meant to further reduce the gap in the availability of (3) and ensure that the child with even severe learning disabilities and difficulties is able to succeed with abundant opportunities for practice.

How is this resource different from any short vowel word list available on the Internet?

1. The sets use minimal pairs to bring the child’s attention to the vowel in the word systematically, consistently, and to an extent predictably.
2. The sets are almost exhaustive. They use all possible relevant minimal pairs in English except those words that are inappropriate for children. This allows the child and the adult to have patience with themselves no matter how long it takes to get them right.
3. The sets reveal how short vowels interact with consonants that follow them. This deepens the child’s understanding of English orthography and makes further reading and spelling such as the floss rule immediately and easily accessible.