Nonsense words for use in training phonemic awarenessWhy use nonsense words to train phonemic awareness? First, it gets rid of interference having to do with the meaning of the word. Using a word that has a meaning familiar to the child can lead to off-topic discussions and narratives that slow down the process. For example, when I use the word foot, there's a pretty good chance I'll be treated to a story about how the child's friend stepped on something and hurt her foot, or how the child's daddy has really big feet and wears boots to shovel snow. Such stories, while delightful, consume time that could otherwise be devoted to training phonemic awareness. Using nonsense words gets rid of interference having to do with the spelling of the word. This is especially important when dealing with a language like English, with its silent letters, digraphs, and other chaotic spelling conventions. For example the first sound in knife is nnn, not k, and the last sound is fff, not ee. Life is full of opportunities to discuss how weird English spelling is; I prefer not to go into that while training phonemic awareness. Finally, children who have already started learning to read and spell tend to give me letter names rather than sounds when I use familiar words. That's not phonemic awareness, that's orthographic awareness. The focus here needs to be on sounds, rather than letters. If I use nonsense words like fooj or fij, the fff sound could be spelled with the letter F or with ph, and the final sound could be a letter j or dge. With nonsense words, it's a lot easier to get the child making sounds rather than naming letters, since they've never memorized nonsense words for their spelling tests. The challenge with using nonsense words is that it's difficult to come up with them on the spur of the moment. To save you the trouble of coming up with nonsense words of your own, I've compiled a selection of words (below) that could exist in American English, but do not. Feel free to print them out and use them as you see fit. My list includes words of the following "shapes": CV (Consonant-Vowel) If you want or need nonsense words with more complex shapes, such as CVCC, CCVC, or CCVCC, you should quite easily be able to make your own based on this list by adding consonants to the beginning or end of the words on this page.
CVC (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) As you can see from this list, there are an awful lot of CVC nonsense words. In fact, I have a lot more than I've listed here! If there is interest, I may make the full list available on a PDF file, but this list should keep you busy for a while. Obviously, there are no standard spellings for any of these words. In creating this list, I tried to use spellings that would make sense to literate speakers of English without being overly misleading or ambiguous. This is easier said than done. For example, to spell a “long A” sound followed by /p/, as in cape, we use a “silent E” after /p/; however, if we do that with the letter G, we get words like cage, rage, page, and sage, in which we pronounce the G as the /j/ sound. I ended up choosing spellings like rayg, payg, and sayg, although rague, pague, and sague could also have worked. I’m not really thrilled with either choice, so it was pretty much a toss of the coin. I could have gotten around this altogether by using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but I’m betting that most of my readers have not studied IPA. Feel free to use whatever spelling works for you. These are, after all, nonsense words. To minimize confusion, I have arranged these words by vowel sound first, then initial consonant sound, then final consonant sound. The consonants are arranged by place of articulation, starting with the bilabials /p/, /b/, and /m/, and ending with the velars /k/ and /g/, and glottal /h/.
Return from Nonsense Words to Phonemic Awareness.
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