Graphemes for the phoneme /s/

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Graphemes for /s/

Tristan and his brother Timothy came for their own English club session and finished the Spring term by exploring the relationships between phonemes and the graphemes used to represent them in English. This analysis came from a revision of the phonology of <c> and from a comment made by Tristan that if the letter <c> represented / s / when followed by the letters <e>, <i> or <y>, then the letter <s> must be used for the rest.

It was a perfect moment to explore whether this hypothesis was indeed correct and it was decided that one way to determine whether this was true was to use homophones. The boys had generated the word <cent> in their revision of <c> and so Tristan was invited to look for any homophones. He had <cent> and quickly generated <sent> and in no time at all had discovered that the digraph <sc> also could represent / s / when he thought of the third homophone: <scent>.

The boys had learned previously that it was important to identify the circumstances that controlled which grapheme to use in representing the phoneme. The following chart is the result of Tristan’s analysis.

The phoneme / s / and the graphemes used to represent it

Tristan uses Real Script and has been since he first started to come to the club. As you can see he is developing a very legible individual style.