Sons et lettres: A Pronunciation Method for Intermediate-level French

PRELIMINARY EXERCISES 37 EXERCISE 1: GRAPHEMES Grapheme: "a letter or combination of letters within a word that represents a given sound" 1. Consider the underlined graphemes in the following list of English words. For each word, can you think of other common words in which the same grapheme represents a different sound than the sound in the given word? Example : met, egg the we, he, she foot: doubt: win: great: thin: chalk: 2. Consider your names (first, middle, last). Can you break them down into the separate graphemes that represent each sound? Does each letter represent a single sound (i.e., is each of the individual letters a distinct grapheme, as in Bob ?), or are some graphemes composed of more than one letter (as in Shawn: sh aw n )? 3. Think back to the spelling rules that you learned in elementary school. Can you remember any of them? Try to think of at least one rule. For example, could you tell a non-English speaker how to pronounce mat and mate , and explain the rule for pronouncing the letter a in these two contexts? Does this rule also apply to other vowels? 4. Consider the Englishword own . Think of other words that include it inwhich - own is pronounced the same way, and words in which it is pronounced in a different way. Does there seem to be any rule that applies to these different pronunciations? 5. What spelling rules having to do with pronunciation do you know in French?