Vowel Sounds? – What a load of phonics!

What are the Vowel Sounds?

From the 26 letters in the English alphabet, 5 of these letters are used to make 19 vowel sounds. The other 21 letters are used to make the 25 consonant sounds.

The 19 vowel phonemes consist of:

5 Long Vowels

5 Short Vowels

3 Dipthongs

A long and short oo (2 sounds)

4 ‘r’ controlled vowel sounds

5 Long Vowel Sounds

Here are some examples:

long /a/ as in gate

long /e/ as in need

long /i/ as in nice

long /o/ as in yoke

long /u/ as in you

 You can also listen to them here:

5 Short Vowel Sounds

Here are some examples:

short /a/ as in bat

short /e/ as in bet

short /i/ as in bit

short /o/ as in bot

short /u/ as in but

 Listen to the short vowel sounds on this video:

4 ‘r’ controlled sounds

‘R’ controlled sounds, have a vowel and the /r/ sound:

or – as in more

ar – as in car

er – as in her

air as in fair

3 Dipthongs

A dipthong is a combination of two sounds, each with two different spellings. Here are three examples:

  •  /au/ as in Paul and aw as in crawl
  • /ou/ as in mouse and ow as in cow
  • /oi/ as in noise and oy as in boy

A Long and Short /oo/ sound

Long /oo/ as in moon

Short /oo/ as in book

So there you have it. The 19 vowel sounds. Of course there are many ways to spell these sounds which we refer to as phonograms.

After listening to the vowel sounds – listen to the consonant sounds

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