Oral

Traps in Oral

• Confuses short and long vowel sounds
  Say minimal pairs aloud: ship/sheep, full/fool. Long vowels (marked ː) are held longer and the tongue is tenser. Spelling is not a reliable guide: 'women' has /ɪ/.
• Judges a sound by its spelling
  English spelling is a poor guide to sound. Say each word aloud (or think of its phonemic symbol) and compare sounds, not letters: 'blood' /ʌ/, 'food' /uː/, 'foot' /ʊ/.
• Confuses diphthongs and monophthongs
  A diphthong glides between two vowel qualities: day /eɪ/, go /əʊ/, my /aɪ/, now /aʊ/, boy /ɔɪ/, here /ɪə/, there /eə/, tour /ʊə/.
• Confuses consonant sounds
  Listen to the sound, not the letter: 'ph' /f/ (phone), 'gh' /f/ (laugh) or silent (night), 'c' /s/ before e, i, y (city) and /k/ elsewhere (cat).
• Picks a near neighbour of the right form
  Name the exact category the stem needs (third conditional; /əʊ/; 'call off' = cancel; clause of concession) and check each option against that name, not against how close it looks.
• Pronounces silent letters
  Common silent letters: k in knee, b in debt/doubt, w in wrist, h in honour, p in psalm, l in calm. Learn the sound, not the spelling.
• Goes by a surface cue instead of the grammar
  Ask what the word is DOING in this sentence (subject? modifier? object?) and what the rule says, not what its ending or look suggests.
• Makes only part of the required change
  List every change the transformation needs (pronoun, tense, time word, word order) and tick each one in the option.
• Misplaces word stress
  Many two-syllable noun/verb pairs shift stress: a REcord (noun) / to reCORD (verb); a PREsent / to preSENT. Suffixes like -tion pull stress to the syllable before: inforMAtion.
• Rhyme judged by spelling
  Rhyme depends on SOUND from the stressed vowel to the end: 'bough' /aʊ/ rhymes with 'cow', not 'cough' /ɒf/.