Is there a more accurate way to describe "short vowels" and "long vowels"?

I was taught in primary school about "short vowels" vs "long vowels". Although it is a simplistic way to teach children, it is also inaccurate, because the sounds are different, not just longer and shorter. According to Wikipedia these names are a hangover from before the Great Vowel Shift.

Long vowels pre and post the Great Vowel Shift:

Spelling   < 1350   > 1600
a..e       /aː/     /eɪ/
e..e       /eː/     /iː/
ea         /ɛː/     /iː/
i..e       /iː/     /aɪ/
o..e       /ɔː/     /oʊ/
oo         /oː/     /uː/
u..e       /uː/     /aʊ/ (like the "ow" in "how", or the "ou" in "loud")

Today:

Letter     "Short"  "Long"
a          /æ/      /eɪ/
e          /ɛ/      /iː/
i          /ɪ/      /aɪ/
o          /ɒ/      /oʊ/
u          /ʌ/      /juː/

As you can see from the table the "long" and "short" forms of the vowel bear almost no relation to each other anymore. I was also taught as a child that each vowel has a single sound value, when there are actually multiple sound values for each letter. I once tried teaching an ESL student about long and short vowels and they immediately became so confused because the long sounds are not predictable from the short ones that I stopped calling them "long" and "short" at once.

I can somewhat understand teaching children this way; getting them used to the sounds each combination of letters frequently makes is more important to their reading skills than getting the terminology spot on. When they're older, it's not worth going back and correcting the terminology. In fact, it could even be confusing.

Since the current description is over 400 years old and doesn't apply to English as it's spoken today (except that diphthongs are usually sounded for longer than monophthongs), what is an accurate way of describing these two groups of vowels that could be taught equally well to young native speakers as well as adult ESL learners?

Solution 1:

Well, you're right that it isn't a good description of English, and it isn't really helpful.

What kids have to learn in school is how to read standard English orthography, however.
That's far from a simple task, and everybody approaches it their own way, teacher and student.
I can't really offer you much advice about teaching reading in general.

From my experience of teaching phonetics and phonetic transcription, however, I suspect there are some students who may benefit from learning how the sounds of their language really work before attempting regular spelling, or at the same time. That way nobody will expect spelling to make any sense.

The American English phonemic system isn't hard to read, and there's a free standard Merriam-Webster pronouncing dictionary of it online. Any kid that speaks American English already can learn the symbol correspondences easily, as soon as they learn to listen for what's really there, instead of what's officially supposed be there, but actually isn't.

It's also useful for explaining how spelling mistakes happen, and for understanding (usually later) the etymologies and word relations behind the scenes. Most importantly, it distinguishes between letters on paper and screens -- visual symbols -- from sounds in the air in the language.

Addendum: the Long/Short distinction is still there in the spelling, of course, since it's still Middle English spelling.

But the vowels that changed in the Great Vowel Shift, which was the long vowels in Middle English that are still called "long" in schools, are all now the Modern English tense and diphthongized vowels, and they're symbolized phonemically by ordinary alphabetic letters with their usual international value (English letter names went through the GVS, too):

• /i, e, o, u/ as in beet, bait, boat, boot.

The vowels that didn't change were the Middle English short vowels. They stayed where they were, more or less, and developed a systematic contrast with the formerly long vowels that has moved into their neighborhood. These are now the Modern English lax and undiphthongized vowels, which are symbolized phonemically by "open" letter symbols that are related to their closest tense vowel symbol:

• /ɪ, ɛ, ɔ, ʊ/ as in /pin, bet, lawn, put/.

This is an alternative to the standard mythology that might be put to use occasionally.