The sound of the letter e in ‘p et’, ‘t en’ and ‘b ed’ with the sounds in ‘h e‘, ‘w e‘, ‘b e‘ and ‘m e‘.

The sound of the letter a in ‘ ant’, ‘h at’ and ‘c an’ with the sounds in ‘ apron’, ‘b asin’ and ‘b agel’.

For example, ask your children to compare: Try to choose simple words at first and avoid digraphs if you haven’t introduced these yet.

Show them some words and discuss the vowel sounds in them. More importantly, though, once you start to hear it in other people’s speech, you will be able to start using it yourself to make your English sound more natural and fluent.Once children can decode simple one and two-syllable words competently, you could prepare them for learning about the schwa by mentioning that letters can stand for different sounds in some words.ĭiscussing some of the different sounds represented by the vowel letters can be a good introduction to this idea because some of the sounds are the same as their letter names and many children are already familiar with these.įor those children who haven’t learned about letter names, this can be an appropriate point to introduce them for the vowels. When you pay attention to it, you will start to hear in lots of words where you would expect it. Make a note of the words it is used in, too. Try listening to a native speaker speaking English and see how often he or she uses the schwa sound. Learning to use the schwa sound correctly will make your speech sound more natural and is a good starting point for more advanced aspects of English pronunciation such as joined sounds or sounds that are dropped when people speak fast. In British English, we often use a schwa for words ending in ‘er’, however in the US, people prefer to actually pronounce the ‘r’ sound at the end. They are usually weak syllables or words that are not stressed such as conjunctions.

We can see that, there are some letters that are often pronounced as schwas. It’s a book about a man who survived a trip to the North Pole. I got a gift for my sister the other day.

What is a schwa sound