Hi Kelsey,
I assure you that you are not alone in having this difficulty!
I think you would have mentioned in your question if your student is an English Learner, but nevertheless, I would be remiss not to mention the impact that this can have on a young student who is trying to learn how to read and spell sounds that they may have very limited history of ever even hearing, much less differentiating.
Regardless of a student’s language background, the short /ĕ/ and /ĭ/ sounds are notoriously difficult. For one, in many people’s dialect (mine included), /ĕ/ is often pronounced as /ĭ/, especially before nasal consonants (i.e., /m/ or /n/). That is to say, in my dialect, the name Ben is a homophone with both been and bin. Likewise, the pairs den/din and pen/pin are also pronounced the same. Thus, if I didn’t have orthographic experience with those words, and I was relying solely on my phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge to think of the word pen, segment out and then spell each of the sounds, I too would spell it <p-i-n>, because that’s how I pronounce it. Please note that this does not mean that my dialect is wrong, or my pronunciation should be corrected, but if I had made such a spelling error as a young student, my teacher could have explained to me, “Yes, many people pronounce this word as /pĭn/. Did you know other people pronounce it as /pĕn/? That’s actually how it’s spelled, as /pĕn/. I want you to try to spell it again, thinking about what letter we use to spell that /ĕ/ sound in /pĕn/.”
Dialect may be impacting your student’s spelling of these two vowels if they either speak a dialect that collapses these two sounds, or frequently hear such a dialect spoken in their family, school, or community. This experience may even have taught the student that these vowels are always tricky, and subsequently have led to them guessing at the vowel out of habit, even if you think the vowel distinction should be clear in a particular word.
Even if you don’t think dialect has a role in your student differentiating between these vowel sounds, these phonemes can be tricky for many children. Acoustically, they sound very similar, especially in a child’s production of these vowels. Additionally, they are produced with very similar mouth shapes and tongue positions. This is important because children will often struggle to both feel the difference in these different mouth and tongue positions, but also struggle to distinguish the difference when seeing others pronounce these vowels. This is in contrast with other phonemes that sound similar (such as /f/ and /th/), but have distinctly different mouth shapes that students can both see and feel.
All that said, for your student, I would start with the highest scaffolded activity and continue up the hierarchy until I reach a level of difficulty he is unsuccessful at, so I know what level to target. Hopefully, your student is familiar with a key word associated with each of these vowels, as likely introduced when initially exposed to these correspondences in kindergarten. Take a picture of these key words (let’s pretend they are ‘igloo’ and ‘edge’), and write the corresponding letter below each picture. Present a word that begins with one of these sounds, and encourage the student to identify which sound that word starts with. Begin with maximum support:
“Listen to this word: itch. Like, I need to scratch an itch. Say itch…(itch). Good, when you hear itch, do you hear an /ĭ/ like in ‘igloo’? Or an /ĕ/ like in ‘edge’?”
Encourage the student to tap on the card with both the picture and letter present. This helps prevent their own production and/or letter confusion impacting their response, and solely focuses on the phonemic awareness task of categorizing and distinguishing the phonemes. Do several words in this manner before trying words that have these vowels in the medial position (e.g., sit, fed, chip). If your student is successful with these tasks (including several words), then begin to reduce the amount of support you are providing by:
- Initially only producing the target word (e.g. ‘chip’) and not reinforcing the key words (i.e. ‘edge’ and ‘igloo’) with each and every trial
- Providing the target words as a picture only rather than allowing the student to hear the teacher model the word unless necessary
- Eventually, covering up the key word image so that the student is responding by the letter only.
If your student was not successful with the initial tasks, then they likely need more intensive work differentiating these phonemes. Model for the student how our jaws lower slightly when producing /ĕ/ as compared with /ĭ/. Allow students to see this from your production of these phonemes, as well as looking at a mirror while they practice. Encourage them to also feel this difference by placing a flat hand underneath their chin as they produce the two phonemes consecutively, as well as alternate between minimal pairs (words that vary only by this phoneme, such as bit/bet, sit/set, big/beg, hid/head, and pit/pet.
I know we covered a lot, but the idea is to find the least amount of support necessary for your student to be successful, and then gradually wean off of that support bit by bit. Best of luck!
