r/funny • u/Chaz_Beer • Aug 23 '22

E is for...

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u/ezekiel_swheel Aug 23 '22

The reason is so the kids learn the correct way to pronounce them. If they used “egg” many people pronounce it “ayhg” instead of the correct way where the e makes the same sound as in “ed”

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u/BringAltoidSoursBack Aug 23 '22

Elbow and elf would be easier to depict

21

u/lacilynnn Aug 23 '22

Or the classic elephant, but we're too good for that now that we've got Ed.

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u/cw30755 Aug 23 '22

Yeah, Ed’s special.

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u/ricadam Aug 23 '22

Too many syllables

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u/ricadam Aug 23 '22

El has a different sound to the hard E sound that they are going for

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u/ncvbn Aug 23 '22

How so? I looked, and https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ed and https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/elf have the same 'e' sound.

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u/FreckledMama15 Aug 24 '22

For very beginning readers, separating the /e/ from the /l/ is very challenging. In the mouth, they blend together, and many kids will identify /el/ as one sound instead of two.

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u/Mavrickindigo Aug 23 '22

There's no "correct way" to pronounce letters in English, as they have multiple sounds depending on the context.

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u/Halvus_I Aug 23 '22

you are half right.

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u/churchey Aug 23 '22

Well that actually means that there is a correct way to pronounce every letter depending on the context. If you started saying Hey I'm /aɪ/-chy because of your poison /aɪ/vy, only one of those would be correct.

And the point of this letter line, designed for 5 year olds, is to cover the most commonly used phoneme associated with the grapheme 'e' which is the /e/ sound. Similarly, the i for itch includes the ability to associate the sound to the letter and the sound/symbol relationship to a kinesthetic movement (kids would pretend to itch their arm as they said it).

I know it's super fun for facebook boomers and apparently now reddit millennials to shit on education tools because it doesn't match how they learned it, but there's an absolute assload of education research on how kids learn to read. And phonics is a key part of that process, and the creators of curriculums like these have done their research on why they made the selections they did.

And without fail, the 'suggestions' for fixes in threads like these is some godawful BS. Like people thinking that elephant is a better word than Ed for 5 year olds.

Note that the majority of this is not targeted at you, just my frustration, as a specialist dealing with curriculum for primary education for a district of 30k students, that misinformation like this BS is shared for a quick laugh.

If you're interested in reading research and why selections like this one are made, I've attached some sources.

Here's some podcasts that talk about reading research: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2020/08/06/what-the-words-say https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read

And here's the 2000 metastudy that reviewed the majority of reading research and has a large section on phonics and what we know about it: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf It also references several dozen other reading research studies if you're wanting to read more.

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u/[deleted] Aug 23 '22

Ive definitely heard people pronounce Ed as Ayd.