The Silly Schwa Sound

What is a schwa sound, and how do we teach it?

This is by far the sound teachers ask about, for a range of reasons. Thankfully when you map words with the MyWordz tech and are talking about the sounds used by the Speech Sound King- and that they can be different to the sounds the teacher or the children use, children tend to understand he schwa with very little instruction.

Here, Maya is showing the mapped word 'collar'. The <ar> maps to The Silly Schwa.

Question. Why use /ʌ/ ?

Teachers often ask about the link between ŭ (the phonics or dictionary symbol) and /ʌ/ (the IPA symbol). This reflects how most synthetic phonics programmes train teachers to think about sounds.

When children segment words in Reception, they often substitute the schwa with /ʌ/. Listen to any child early in the Reception year segmenting ‘about’, and you’ll usually hear /ʌ/ rather than /əˈbaʊt/.

We talk about this during word mapping training, and that there’s a recognisable stage when they begin to segment in the ‘technically’ correct way.

We call it the ‘silly schwa’ because it sounds odd in isolation, and we sound a bit silly pronouncing that grunty sound that’s so natural in speech but not in isolation.

Most children can hear the difference very quickly (those with a high dyslexia risk won’t).

For instance, at first Lara might pronounce her name as /lɑːrʌ/ but later realise she actually says /lɑːrə/. She is also able to see the sound value for the two <a> graphemes in her name.

Because the sound is so unnatural in isolation (is far easier to pronounce) many will tell us they don't want to use it in their name

Teachers often think the sounds they use when they say words should be used. eg if they say 'chicken' with a schwa before the <n> then that's what they use when mapping words with the children - rather than using the IPA, which would be ʧɪkɪn. An Australian teacher might say the word as ʧɪkən For 1 in 4 children this can create huge issues.

We have a story about the Speech Sound King's Code. So the mapping reflects his accent (Received Pronunciation - the sounds of phonics!)

This also aligns with the IPA used in England and with DfE guidance eg in the Phonic Screening Check guidance and Spelling curriculum

When teaching phonics, a universal code is the base. So we wouldn’t teach <a> to map with the sound a lot of Aussie kids use when saying ant or pan (think pairn). Phonics follows a code so that every child understands speech to print.

Start with the universal code, for example ant /ænt/, even if a child says /eənt/. Then discuss accents.

If the word was 'chicken' start with the universal mapping /ˈʧɪkɪn/, even if you also discuss with the children that they might say /ˈʧɪkən/. We use Phonemies that children can manipulate, as many of our students are non-speaking. These show the sound value of the phoneme part of GPCs.

It also helps to use examples that are more widely pronounced when demonstrating the schwa, a grunty “uh”. For Australian speakers, I’d use a word like pupil, as the <i> clearly maps to the schwa between the <p> and the <l>: /ˈpjuːpəl/.

I find it’s best during teacher training in word mapping to give an example word that the majority use and then discuss regional variation and natural speech. Although some may use the schwa when saying ‘chicken’, it’s not the majority, so you lose the opportunity to explore the schwa properly if you start there. People think, ‘I don’t say it like that,’ and that’s why we lose many learners too if we don’t introduce a universal code first. Stanislas Dehaene mentions this Universal Code in Reading in the Brain.

Because young children find the Silly Schwa sound difficult to produce, and as they don't use it when segmenting words, we show the Blue Cow in the first high frequency words (Duck Levels 1 and 2), the Green and Purple Code Level readers, and the 36 mapped pre-readers and 16 intro readers (see the library - SpeediesReadies.com) This is because of a broader issue faced when segmenting words into isolated sounds (Seidenberg talks about this a lot - segmenting words into single phonemes is very manufactured. If you were to record those segmented sounds and put them back together they wouldn't sound like the actual word. Say the sounds in 'wobble' and you'll understand what I mean. Most brains navigate it though, thank heavens! But so that we aren't asking children to use a sound that they initially can feel quite strongly about, we use the Blue Cow while talking about the Speech Sound King using the Silly Schwa.

The word a should be the Silly Schwa. In these books the children feel happier when it's the /ʌ/

When we show the orthographic code we have to do very little 'teaching' of phonics as they can SEE how the letters and sounds connect. Our at risk children - primarily those with poor phonemic awareness and phonological working memory - are also supported.

Emma Hartnell-Baker is an expert in facilitating Word Mapping Mastery and explains on this page why very early phonics resources show the /ʌ/ Blue Cow Speech Sound Monster when it is technically (IPA-checked) the ə schwa. What matters is how children connect speech sounds, spelling, and meaning within the orthographic lexicon – not teaching them linguistics or prioritising technical accuracy when this conflicts with strategies that help the greatest number of children understand these links.

Those who learn to read primarily through self-teaching, and recoding of whole words using phonemic awareness will use their own accents. They don't face the issues that explicit phonics instruction can create. But that's something we can discuss another day!