Is "shop " a CVC word or a CCVC word?

Is shop a CVC word?

Or, to rephrase the question, in the CVC structure, do C and V each refer to a single sound or to a single letter?

As I see it, a C or a V means a sound, and a sound could be 1 or 2 letters, so I thought a word like sh-o-p or b-a-th is a CVC word.

Just now someone told me that in CVC, C or V refer to a letter, so shop is a CCVC word.

Is that right or wrong?

Solution 1:

C and V here only ever refer to sounds, never to letters. The word shop is pronounced either [ʃɒp] or [ʃɑp] depending on your accent, so it’s a CVC word: one consonant sound, one vowel sound, and one consonant sound. Letters never matter.

Solution 2:

English orthography and phonology are very different. And syllable structure has nothing to do with orthography, it's about sounds. So it's CVC word.