Long Vowel Sound Spellings
Written by: Brianna Guild, MHSc SLP
Date: August 29, 2024
If you need a quick reference for “long vowel sounds” and their many spellings, this blog is for you.
The charts below outline the different spellings of what are commonly referred to as the “long vowel sounds.”
Colour key for long vowel spellings:
Green = most common spellings
Yellow = common spellings
Blue = infrequent to rare spellings
People write/refer to these sounds many different ways, so here’s a quick reference for that issue too:
Why are these sounds written so many different ways?
- Many people generally refer to these as “long vowel sounds” (e.g., long a).
- Educators often use a horizontal bar (macron) above the vowel to represent a long vowel (e.g., ā in bāke) and curved symbol (breve) above the vowel to represent a short vowel (e.g., ă in băt).
- Speech-Language Pathologists and Linguists use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), an internationally recognized set of phonetic symbols that follows a strict one-to-one correspondence between sounds and symbols (e.g., bake = /beɪk/).
Here is a long vowel sound word sort to help students learn or review the different spellings of each long vowel sound: Sort Long Vowel Sounds A, E, I, O, U by Spelling.
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Here are some literacy activities focusing on long vowel sounds:
References:
Fry, E. (2004). Phonics: A Large Phoneme-Grapheme Frequency Count Revised. Journal of Literacy Research, 36 (1), 85-98. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15548430jlr3601_5
Ginsberg, M. (2020). Reading Simplified Full Code Chart.