English language is notorious for its weird phonetics. All too often learning
how to spell English words can be frustrating for non-native speakers. Being an
EFL teacher working with elementary and middle school kids, I learned it the
hard way. Many of my young students used to get bored or frustrated with all
this crazy phonics stuff. Indeed, it seems that there are as many exceptions as
there are rules in English phonetics. Even adult students find their heads
spinning when they learn that words floor, flood, food are pronounced
differently. There are plenty of such cases when the same letter or combination
of letters form different sounds and often inexplicably. It can pretty much
confuse kids who are just starting to learning English in non-English speaking
countries. It is also a big challenge for EFL and ESL teachers because they have
to add as much fun to their lessons as possible to make kids fall in love with
learning English from the very beginning. Unfortunately, there is not too much
fun in learning baffling English phonics rules and numerous exceptions.
Therefore I have designed another collection of printable phonics worksheets to
help my young students learn how to correctly write and pronounce a lot of
tricky English words. These worksheets are designed to make English phonetics
less boring and intimidating. The worksheets are also great for memorizing such
words and thus strengthening students' vocabulary thanks to many colorful pictures that I used to design these teaching printables.
I offer my students the
phonics worksheets after I introduce and discuss the key phonics rules including
how to pronounce English diphthongs, digraphs, blends etc. I use my printable sound charts and phonics posters for the introduction.
The collection includes
more than 170 printable phonics worksheets that offer mostly matching
activities. There is a set of worksheets that help my students memorize symbols
of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The IPA is very important for
non-native English learners as major dictionaries use the IPA for transcription
of words. The IPA phonetic transcription is frequently the only way EFL students
can learn the right way to pronounce this or another English word.
Matching Worksheets
My phonics
worksheets offer two types of matching tasks:
- matching API symbols to words;
- matching words having the same sound.
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| One of phonics worksheets offering students to match vowel sounds in words to corresponding IPA symbols. |
