Talk:Systematic Phonics/Blend

This seems an un-necessary concept to bother to teach. Inasfar as most speech consists of more than one sound, one could say that all speech is a blend. To suggest that "br" is a single sound is to ignore the way in which it is composed of two sounds, the way that "r" isn't. If there are to be blends, why do they not include clusters of vowels and consonants, such as "bri" in "bring". If "bri" is a cluster or a blend, then so is "bring" which is, of course, also a word. Although phonics focuses on this distracting concept of clusters/blends, it seems oblivious to the fact that some vowels which are written with one letter are actually diphthongs and therefore consist of a glide between two vowel-positions.

I can't see what possible good there is in telling a child that, if you put p and l together you get (wait for it) pl. Pl isn't a sound in its own right, but just two sounds attached. The inventors of phonics may have got confused by combinations such as th and sh. Maybe they think that one produces the th and sh sounds by somehow combining a t or an s with an h. That is untrue.

Phonics, I'm afraid, has all the marks of having been created by people who don't know English phonology.