This question often arises around short vowel sounds that vary their pronunciation slightly based on surrounding consonants. We know that in spoken language, pronunciations vary. Words such as an and dog, that may not have pure short vowel sounds when spoken as words, are recognizable to students when they blend the individual sounds using a pure short vowel sound. We want to develop students’ phonemic awareness to the point where they recognize slightly distorted sounds.
Pronunciation variations highlight the importance of continuous blending for decodable words. It is critical that students sound out words by holding the sounds, and move from one sound to the next without stopping, so they can hear and recognize the word that results from the blending. While other programs may teach words like am and an as welded sounds, we like to point out that they still have two phonemes. When /a/ is followed by /m/ or /n/ we hear the nasally /a/ sound, which will appear naturally as students blend. For example, with the word an, when continuously blending, you will notice that your mouth and tongue move to form the sound of /n/ (which distorts the /a/) and you’ll hear the recognizable word an.
The sight word strand introduces two kinds of words: high-frequency, phonetically irregular words and high-frequency, phonetically regular words that are not decodable when they are introduced (the words in the second group will become decodable once the students have mastered more letter sounds). For example, in Lesson 8 the word on is taught as a phonetically regular sight word because the sound /o/ will not be introduced until Lesson 26.