l as in lot

ll as in bell

le as in bottle

lle as in grille

gl as in imbroglio

sl as in island

sle as in isle

hl as in kohl

4 responses to “l”

  1. An Unhappy Teacher says:

    Hated it didn’t give me what I wanted

  2. Rose says:

    Hi, If you have time, could you please look at this page of phoneme-spellings pairings? (link is below) It has listed il, al, el, ol as making a /l/ phoneme. However, I don’t think this is the case. What do you think? Thanks 🙂

    https://www.phonicbooks.co.uk/content/uploads/2016/05/complex-phonic-code-poster-OLDER-2020.pdf

    • alison says:

      Hi Rose, this is a tricky question because the sound /l/ can act as a syllable in words where it follows an alveolar stop (/t/ or /d/) e.g. rattle, bottle, paddle, peddle etc, we don’t bother saying a vowel, just go straight to the /l/. Of course some words like this are spelt as in petal, metal, pistol, etc, and teaching kids the difference between the ‘le’, ‘al’, ‘el’, ‘il’ and ‘ol’ spellings that don’t have a vowel pronounced and those that do is kind of diminishing marginal utility. I tend to nowadays teach final syllable ‘le’ words first and tell kids to just say /l/ for them (even if they do have an unstressed vowel in normal speech) and then later on ask kids to over-pronounce the other spellings to include the ‘short’ vowel most commonly represented by that vowel letter. Hope that makes sense, All the best, Alison

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