Things You Might Not Know About Liquids, Glides, and Combinations

Hi friends! This week I'm finishing up our review of the consonant sound groupings. If you are working on implementing a sound wall or shifting your approach to teaching phonics, then this is a great review.

We now understand that sound production and mouth formations are key to helping students link the phonemes, those sounds that they hear, to the graphemes, which are the letter representations of those spoken sounds. They also provide students and teachers with cues for error corrections. Explicitly teaching these to our students provides them with the knowledge and ability to analyze sounds in a deeper way. These articulatory gestures are grouped by stops, fricatives, nasals, affricates, liquids, glides, and combinations. You can find the whole series through the links at the end of this post.

In this week's post and video, we're going to be reviewing liquids, glides, and combinations. Liquids are those sounds that seem to float in our mouth. They influence the vowels that come before them, and their pronunciation changes somewhat according to the surrounding sounds.

What are liquid sounds?

We have l and r. When we make the /l/ sound, we lift our tongue to the top of our mouth behind our teeth. The /r/ sound is one that often poses difficulty for students and teachers alike. We want to make sure that we're producing this in its purest form. It sounds different from the combination vowel-r.

Tips for producing the r sound

There are actually two different ways you can place your mouth. You want to determine what's going to work best for you and your students. One way is to have students round their mouth and curl their tongue to the sides as they pull their tongue down and back. Sometimes, I'll tell my students to make their mouth like they're blowing a kiss and then just relax that a little bit. I demonstrate this sound in the video above. 👆 Another way to produce the sound is to have both sides of the tongue touching the top of the mouth and then have the tongue retracting. You decide what works for you. The liquids can take some time to practice in isolation, but mouth formation and placement can assist /l/ and /r/.

Glides

Glides are those sounds that have vowel-like qualities. They combine with vowels and are almost always followed by a vowel. They literally glide into the vowel sound. When working on individual phonemes, we want to try to keep the vowel sound from the end of the sound production. Our glides are wh, w, and y. Some programs will teach /w/ as either voiced or unvoiced. Go with what your program teaches, but understand that there is a current shift in American English right now where /hw/ and /w/ are being produced the same way as voiced sounds. Regardless of if you teach /w/ as a voiced or unvoiced sound, you want to round your lips. For /hw/, you want to form the mouth the same way. Again, some programs are going to teach wh as voiced, some as unvoiced.

Our final glide is y. For the mouth placement for this phoneme, we want to make sure that we're kind of smiling and pulling that tongue back from the roof of the mouth.

Finally, we have two combinations, two sounds that are coming together. We have the letter x, and some programs teach qu. The phoneme for the letter x is made up of two sounds. I demonstrate these sounds in the video above.

We always want to bring it back to the mouth formations and checking that the sound is matching up with how we're forming them in our mouth. Make sure you are doing lots of practice activities for practice in isolation, within words, connecting to reading and spelling applications. All of these are key for student success.

I hope this video helps you with identifying liquids, glides, and combinations. You can find the whole series on sound production on my Instagram TV, YouTube channel, and my other blog posts. If you want more tips and information about reading and dyslexia, be sure to get on our newsletter HERE. 

I've had lots of people asking about the sight word strategy that I created. You can read the blog for a deeper dive into these sound-to-print cards that are one of my favorite tools for teaching sight words to my students. 

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