{"id":232,"date":"2024-03-05T12:16:01","date_gmt":"2024-03-05T12:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/?p=232"},"modified":"2024-03-06T09:15:41","modified_gmt":"2024-03-06T09:15:41","slug":"the-tip-of-the-tongue-and-the-lips-and-the-teeth-or-phonetics-for-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/2024\/03\/05\/the-tip-of-the-tongue-and-the-lips-and-the-teeth-or-phonetics-for-kids\/","title":{"rendered":"The tip of the tongue and the lips and the teeth (or, phonetics for kids)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Strange things are happening in the world of education. To the benefit of absolutely no-one, STEM subjects are frequently held up as the only ones worth studying, while technological advances (and misadventures<\/a>) demonstrate the need, time and time again, for a nuanced understanding of human beings, how they think, and how they move through the world. In short, we all need more of the arts and humanities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a discipline that straddles both STEM and arts and humanities, we have a unique opportunity in linguistics to disrupt the current binary discourse (STEM or bust) and muddy the waters wherever possible. Linguists frequently apply the scientific method to that most human of behaviours, language, but just recently, my fabulous colleague Dr Emma Nguyen<\/a> and I had the chance to squeeze some awareness of being human into a science space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The scene:<\/strong> STEAM week at a very lovely local primary school. The brief:<\/strong> chatting to year 3 (ages 8-9) about muscles. The topic?<\/strong> Well, as linguists, we were duty bound to present the group of muscles that gave our field its name*<\/a><\/sup> – the tongue. The tongue is crucial for spoken language, but what did our 8 year olds already know about how it shapes language sounds?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By year 3, children in English schools have had a few years of instruction in phonics – a system that teaches the most common associations between sounds (phones) and letters (graphs) to help children \u2018decode\u2019 written words. The principle is that by sounding out a word\u2019s constituent graphs and blending the corresponding phones, children can break into written English without needing to rely (too heavily) on memorising full word forms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the phonics schemes we\u2019ve come across as parents or in conversation with schools spend very little time on explicitly describing how, where<\/em> and with what body parts<\/em> sounds are made. Some schemes even include mascots that make speech sounds despite having no lips or teeth<\/a>. Teachers say that the sounds made at the very front of the mouth like \/p,b,m\/ might elicit some discussion about the lips, and sounds like \/f,v\/ are talked about in terms of lips and teeth. But sounds at the back of the mouth like \/k,g,\u014b\/? No-one is sure how to talk about how these sounds come into being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the tongue and the back of the mouth are as foreign to our year 3s as the Moon. But unlike the Moon, we don\u2019t need a rocket to find out more about them. Instead, we used a little trick sometimes employed in first year university phonetics classes<\/a> (that would also buy us a bit of notoriety – more on that later). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s how the tongue makes sounds? Sweet!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We ran a little experiment, turning Willy Wonka by handing out lollipops**<\/a><\/sup> (or lollipop sticks to anyone who didn\u2019t fancy a sweet). We instructed the children to put the lollipop toward the back of their tongue, then we all read together words with different vowel sounds in them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n