Welcome back to "Teaching in Room 9," our region's largest classroom. My name is Julia, I'm one of the second grade teachers at the Soulard School, in here for "Teaching in Room 9," this time around, ...

This can make learning to spell the words quite tricky! Watch this short video to see some more examples of silent letter words. Vowel sounds are made by the letters 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o' and 'u'.

We learn about 6 vowel letters and the numerous sounds we make when using them. In English, we have 5 (well, sometimes 6) vowel letters, but way more vowel sounds. That’s where the IPA can help us! We ...

The great vowel shift did not involve the shortening or the forward movement of vowels, as Michael Erard says (29 March, p 28). Only the long vowels shifted – upwards – or became diphthongs (two ...

The English language has very interesting sound patterns and pronunciation rules that sets it apart from other languages. These sounds tend to be difficult, if not tiresome for non-native speakers to ...

These "I" and "E" vowels are formed by putting your tongue forward in the mouth. That's why they're called "front" vowels. With these words, your tongue depresses and folds back a bit. So "O", "A" and ...

Professor William Labov, a University of Pennsylvania linguist and author of the new book Atlas of North American English Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change, says there is a shift of vowel sounds ...

Sound doesn’t fossilize. Language doesn’t either. Even when writing systems have developed, they’ve represented full-fledged and functional languages. Rather than preserving the first baby steps ...

What is a digraph? Well, there are plenty of them in English and it’s where two ‘written letters’ represent one phonetic sound. For example, in the word ‘phonetic’. the first two letters <ph> are ...