Do you know what a short or long vowel sound is?

There are 26 letters in English and we use these letters to represent different sounds.

Phoneme: this is the smallest unit of sound in a word, e.g., these words have three sounds each p/a/d and p/a/t. There are 44 phonemes in English and they can be represented by a different number of letters:

• one letter for each sound as in the word c/a/ t,

• two letters for a sound as in the word sh/i/p,

• three letters for a sound as in the word l/igh/t and

• four letters as in the word d/ough.

Many phonemes can be spelled in different ways, e.g., the phoneme ee can be spelled in several ways: bee, he, leap, field, funny and key.

Many phonemes also have more than one way of spelling them. For instance, the f soundcan be spelled out as ph and oo can be spelled as ue.

Vowels: there are five vowels in English: A, E, I, O and U. These vowels make up 20 phonemes that fit into the categories of: short vowels, long vowels and diphthongs. 

Long vowels: say the name of the letter, e.g., like the a in ape. Regular long vowels usually say the name of the first letter, or they have double letters to make the sound, e.g., ae, ie, ee, oo, ea and so on.

Short vowels make a different, short sharp sound, like a in apple. The sound a vowel makes depends on the letters around it; e.g., a short vowel is often followed by a consonant, whereas a long vowel can be followed by a consonant and a silent e or another vowel that forms a vowel team.

A vowel team is a spelling pattern that uses two or more letters to represent a phoneme. These can also be referred to as vowel digraphs or diphthongs, e.g., the long ‘a’ vowel teams: ai, ay, ea, eigh, ey.

A diphthong is a vowel sound that begins in one place of articulation and moves to another, e.g., air, ou, oy, ure etc.