Say That Again?

OK, homeschoolers—Listen up!  Not to me, but to your kids.  Are your kids (and mine) settling in to poor speech patterns because we just do not hear them?  Many times we parents are the last to hear mispronunciation or sloppy grammar because we get used to hearing it every day.  Here are a few difficulties that I have observed, in our own family as well as from a few others I have heard.   

 

                   

1.  Have you seen a Valentin lately?  We SPECIALIZE in malocclusion (that’s “buck teeth”, for you lay people).  Six kids with overcrowding and overbites?  We are an orthodontist’s dream and a speech therapist’s nightmare!   

 

At first I was puzzled why all my kids suddenly began mumbling in the fourth grade.  Early home videos showed perfect diction, and then suddenly, I had no idea what my kids were saying.  Besides the fact that they all talk faster than an auctioneer, we had another issue:  They were using their teeth to substitute for their upper lips for certain consonants (b, p, and m).  Say “Mike Mulligan misses Maryanne,” but use your front teeth instead of your upper lip.  Ah-ha.  If your kids are candidates for orthodontic work, maybe you are hearing this bad habit too.  Kids with buck teeth have a harder time reaching around their teeth, and without even meaning to, they use their lips.  (They also start chewing with their mouths open.  Yuck.  Braces are a blessing—and not just to the patient!) 

 

2.  Phonics is our friend.  More and more children are being taught sight-reading, which is basically just memorizing certain spelling words without having to sound them out.  One of my first clues that a child is being taught “sight reading” is the introduction of very advanced words in kindergarten.  For example, if your kindergartener is spelling “kingdom,” I can almost guarantee they are getting sight-reading and spelling.  The actual phonics rules that indicate how to sound out “kingdom” are beyond kindergarten level.  That’s second semester first grade, or even second grade.  Your child just memorized the word, which is certainly handy if your child is a fantastic memorizer. 

 

But remember:  The English language has over one million words, with new words being coined every day, thanks to the influence of technology and immigration.  Wouldn’t it just be easier to learn the simple rules, rather than memorize one million words?  Usually by third grade, the chickens some home to roost.  Kids who were quoting “kingdom” in kindergarten are struggling with “being” and “through”, substituting other words in their places. And here’s where speech comes in:  People who think phonetically will pronounce phonetically.  Have you ever heard someone talk about calling for an “am-blance,” instead of an “am-bu-lance”?  If you’ve read the word phonetically, you will never be tempted to remove that “u.”  The same is true with “breftest” for “breakfast,” “samwich” for “sandwich,” and “birfday” for “birthday.” 

 

Additionally, our internal dialogue is reinforced by good reading.  Kids who are digesting a steady diet of casual, easy reading will never expand their mental dictionary.  What our kids read eventually comes out of their mouths (another good reason to screen the books our kids read!).  When our older kids went through their Bobbsey Twins stage (not necessarily classical literature, but wholesome books anyway), we suddenly started hearing archaic  terms like “keen” and “swell” come out of their mouths!  Their books were 1959 editions, discarded from a public library, and their language was reflecting their reading.  When our daughter read Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm for an eighth grade book report last year, I noticed a marked difference in her writing skills.  Good writers stretch us. 

 

3.  “I’d like to buy a vowel!”   . . . or a consonant.  Or a blend.  We need to listen for the missing letters.  One of our kids struggled for a while with the “th” blend, and I’ve noticed this common mistake in other kids also.  Beware of “dat” instead of “that,” “duh” instead of “the”, and we already noted “birfday” instead of “birthday.”  Remind your kids to stick their tongues out a little.  J  Sloppy tongues remind me of dull pencils.  They produce mushy, smudgy sounds rather than distinct letters. 

 

4.  Childhood is so cute, with all of its little mispronunciations.  Who hasn’t chuckled over “pasghetti” or “smashed potatoes”?  Because Josh still says “w” instead of “l,” we have “yewow wegos” instead of “yellow legos.”  When it was cold last spring, he shuddered and said, “It’s weewy cheewy outside. “  It was “really chilly,” but we all had a good laugh.  If Josh were eight, though, we would not be laughing so hard.  We need to be careful of allowing childish cuteness to find its way into big kids’ mouths.  If our children do not have an actual speech impediment, we might need to do a little nagging. Homeschool moms, I’m afraid we might be some of the worst culprits here because we have gotten so used to hearing our kids talk like this that we no longer hear it.  Traditional teachers catch these errors because they have higher expectations.  Maybe we need to raise the bar a little as well.  If a Sunday school teacher or relative constantly has to have an interpretation, we may need to zone in on some areas that need work. 

 

5.  “ARRRRRRRRR!”  Tony the Tiger thinks Frosted Flakes are “GRRRRRRRRRRRREAT!”, but that’s harder than it sounds sometimes.  There are people who honestly cannot say “r”, due to the shape of their pharynx.  If your child is one of them, a speech therapist has much more to offer you than what my little blog can do, and this is not meant to burden you with undue guilt or embarrassment.  But if your child is just sliding into speech patterns that he brought into adolescence from infancy, this may be an area to work on. 

 

6.  Slow. Down.  Maybe our kids are talking too fast, or maybe we aren’t really listening.  Either way, we all could use some air brakes.  As I already confessed, my kids all talk like I do:  Faster than a speeding bullet, but it doesn’t always come out sounding like “Superman.”  Listening to our kids read aloud at family devotions or in school time reveals some of the bad habits they might be developing, and reading out loud to our children reveals pronunciations to them.  More than once, we have come across a word and heard one of our kids exclaim, “Oh—THAT’S how you say it!  I always thought it was a different way!” 

 

The ability to develop complex language is the gift that God gave to man and withheld from the animal kingdom.  Parrots have given it their best shot, but original language is unique to the only creature God gave a soul—because He had a message for that creature.  Salvation is offered to us, and God teaches us about that magnificent gift through His Word.  It matters how our kids talk—not just so they can pass a spelling test or recite a poem.  God has entrusted us to share this message of salvation with our own generation.    

 

“How shall they hear, without a preacher?”  (Romans 10:14)