What in the world are affricates?

Hi friends. This week, I am continuing our review of the consonant sound groupings. If you are working on implementing a sound wall, want to review your sound production, or even just want to look at teaching phonics in a different way, then this week's post is for you.

Sound production and mouth formations are key to helping our students link the phonemes, sounds that they hear, to the graphemes, which are letter representations of those spoken sounds. It also helps students and teachers with cues for error corrections. Explicitly teaching this to our students can help them deepen their knowledge and understanding of our language system. If you haven't heard of the term affricates, you're not alone. Many programs or trainings may not introduce this term, however, my guess is that you're already teaching them. Consonants are usually grouped or taught according to their articulation features or how the sound is made. These articulatory gestures are grouped by stops, fricatives, nasals, affricates, liquids, glides, and combinations. You can find the whole series on sound production on my Instagram TV, YouTube channel, and my other blog posts. 

What in the world are affricates?

Affricates are those sounds that begin as a stop and release as a fricative. A stop sound is made with a burst of sound or air, and a fricative is a continuous sound that forms friction in the mouth. Affricates are the combination of these two formations. These consonant sounds are paired by voiced and unvoiced groupings. There's also only two affricates. In the video above 👆, we take a look at affricates. 

I'll explain a little bit about what I show in the video. The ch sound is a production of starting with a stop sound and then releasing the air through a small opening, which causes that friction. You can feel the the release of air if you place your hand in front of your mouth. It's a really quick release of air, and we're not going to be able to continue the sound. If you place your hand on your voice box and say ch, you're going to notice that this is an unvoiced sound. This means that there's no sound vibrations made during the sound production. When explicitly teaching the sound to students we want to have them look in a mirror to see how their mouth is formed, feel their voice box to determine if it's voiced or unvoiced, and place a hand in front of their mouth to feel the release of air.

There's two different spellings for ch. We have digraph ch as in chip, lunch, or chair. Then, we have trigraph tch. With the spelling generalization of if we have a one syllable base word and you hear tch after a short vowel sound, then it's going to be spelled trigraph tch as in match and witch. Final ch can also be spelled digraph ch after a consonant sound, long vowel sound, or vowel pair.

The voice pairing for ch is j. We're going to have the students look at their mirror again, make the sound, and then have them turn their voice on. We want them to discover that the only difference is whether it's voiced or unvoiced.

We have three different spellings for j. We have the initial position as in jam, and then we can also have g as in giraffe. This is that soft g concept of g before e, i, or y is pronounced a certain way as I demonstrate in the video. In the final position of a word we can use either trigraph dge or ge. We're going to use trigraph dge in a one syllable base word after a short vowel sound as in badge or lodge. Anything else we're going to use ge like in hinge or verge.

We want to remember that we want to keep our sounds in their purest form in isolation. Remember, if you hear an error in sound production, you want to model the correct sound and have students echo it right away before moving on. We always want to bring it back to the formation of our mouth 👄 and checking whether the sound is a stop sound and it releases as a fricative. Also, following up with lots of activities where students identify the sounds and isolation within words connected to spelling and reading.

I hope the video and this post helps with identifying those affricates. If you want more tips and information about reading and dyslexia, be sure to get on our newsletter HERE.

Have a great week!

Casey