Cat, cet, cit, cot, cut (?)

I work with the level three students at Sri Sai School.  For the past couple weeks we have been following a particular schedule: introductions, followed by phonics and vocabulary lessons (with a game in between) and a story to wrap up.  Everything has been going smoothly and we are all pretty satisfied with the results we have been seeing in the kids’ abilities.   Teaching phonics has been our biggest struggle.  We often have to spend so much time going over the difference between the how the kids want to pronounce the letter ‘u’ (oo) and how it is pronounced in the word ‘put.’  Spending so much time on this was not seen as a problem to us because it is very important that a student is able to read correctly, right?  I believed this until the math teacher at the school made me second guess our methods.

Last Tuesday, Manoj and I were teaching the students how to pronounce each vowel correctly, which proved difficult as the students repeatedly mixed up and mispronounced vowel sounds.  To try and correct this, we were having them read a string of words with identical consonants and differing vowels.  For example, we would have them read ‘pat, pet, pit, pot, put’ and make sure they were correctly differentiating between each vowel sound.  Many of our combinations included non-words like the series ‘cat, cet, cit, cot, cut.’  We did not think much of these non-words as we were only trying to get them to sound things out correctly.  In the middle of this exercise the school math teacher came in and asked us why we were teaching them words that don’t even have meanings.  We tried to explain to him that we were only teaching phonetics at that point but he still didn’t understand.

I didn’t think much of this incident until later that night.  It really started to bother me that rather than using our limited time to teach the students important vocabulary, we were teaching them how to pronounce a stupid non word like ‘cit.’ What about being able to pronounce ‘cit’ is going to help these children in the long run?  More questions similar to this one led me to an even bigger, perhaps unanswerable question: How can we use what little time we have to benefit these children the most?  Is it more important to teach them to recognize minute discrepancies between the different pronunciations of the letter ‘u’ or should we be giving them sufficient vocabulary to have a fair shot in an English based competitive work force?  While our group agrees that reading and writing are important, we argue how to allocate our time. We don’t have enough time to teach both of these aspects as much as we would like and if we focus on both of them equally we will not see a vast improvement in either.

I’m not sure there is a correct way balance phonics and vocabulary, but I am sure that we care about each of our kids and are passionate about enabling them to succeed despite the unfortunate hand they have been dealt.  We regularly question our methods and worry that we are not doing as much possible to help these students.  These doubts don’t show our weaknesses but, rather, our biggest strength: passion.