Or, to say it another way, the r sound changes the way we say the vowel sound before it. When I talk about r-controlled vowels, I am talking about four vowel sounds that are said differently because they are followed by the letter r. When we begin talking about vowels, it is very important that we distinguish whether we are talking about a letter or a sound. Listen to those three words again: top, home, dog. If we add the word 'dog', we find another sound represented by the o, the (aw sound) sound. Already we can see the letter o representing two different sounds, the (short o) sound and the (long o) sound.

How do we have so many sounds for so few letters? Well, think about the words 'top' and 'home'. These five vowels are used to represent 15 different sounds. The letters that aren't consonants, are vowels.

For example, the letters t, d, s, z, l, and r, are consonants. In the Latin alphabet, the alphabet English uses, we have 26 letters. So what are these r-controlled vowels I've been talking about for 2 weeks now? All of the sounds I've talked about so far have been consonant sounds. I hope you've all had a chance to visit and see the other free practice activities we offer on that site as well as read the transcripts if they help you understand this information.ĭid you are memorize last week's practice sentence 'I would really like a little red wagon like Laura's'? How about the sentence before that 'On Thursday, Thelma threw three red rocks'? Before that, we had the s sound, z sound practice in the sentence 'Cats love boxes dogs love beds.' Today we will learn about r-controlled vowels and we will practice the sentence 'Learning early in the morning can be fairly hard work.' If this is your first time listening to this podcast, you should know that this is the third of three podcasts dealing with the l sound and r sound, and you may want to go back and start with podcast #4. My name is Mandy, and this is podcast number 6. Hi everyone, and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English Pronunciation Podcast.

What is an r controlled vowel