My Preps say the a in 'camp' differently. Is it a new sound?

Yes, plenty of Australians say the a in camp, hand and man differently from the a in cat and bag. Before an m or n it often comes out higher and longer, the sound some teachers call the "whiny a". It's still the same phoneme, /a/, spelled with the letter a. (The slashes mean the sound, not the letter.) So you don't teach it as a new sound or give it its own sound card. You do plan for it, because it changes how words sound when you blend, which words make easy first examples, and what children write when they spell.

What's going on in "camp"

Phoneticians call this an allophone: one sound in the system, said a little differently depending on what comes after it.

Macquarie University phoneticians Felicity Cox and Sallyanne Palethorpe describe a split in Australian short a. Before a nasal consonant (m, n), the vowel can rise until it overlaps with the vowel in "Ben". Before other consonants it stays low.

The part that explains every staffroom argument about it: not everyone does it. One study of 30 female Australian English speakers sorted them into two groups, those with the split and those without. Cox and Palethorpe found it in 66% of the young Sydney women they measured, and a 2019 study of Northern Queensland speakers found similar proportions in men and women. In that study the vowels in man and men had the same quality before a nasal. Only length kept them apart, with the a held longer.

So when one teacher says "you have to teach the whiny a" and another says "I've never heard an Australian say cairmp", they can both be describing real Australians.

Many speakers also lengthen the a in a few other words, like bad, sad and bag. Same deal, same phoneme.

Do you teach a "crisp a" and a "whiny a"?

No. Teach one sound for a: /a/ as in apple. That's what the Australian Curriculum asks for in Foundation (AC9EFLY10: recognise and name all upper- and lower-case letters and know the most common sound each letter represents).

The nasal version isn't something a child has to learn in order to read. Their mouth does it automatically when an m or n follows, because they already talk that way. What you're teaching is that the a in cat and the a in camp are the same letter doing the same job.

If a child notices the difference, and some will, tell them so:

"You've got good ears. When m or n comes after a, our mouths make it a bit longer. It's still a."

That's the whole explanation. No new grapheme, no extra card on the wall.

Choose early blending words with this in mind

It's the consonant after the a that matters. An m or n before the vowel does nothing to it, so mat, map and nap behave like cat.

Worth knowing, because most Australian programmes put a nasal in their first handful of sounds. InitiaLit opens with s, m, t, a, p. Literacy Hub opens with s, a, t, p, i, n. So words like am, Sam, man and pan turn up in the first blending sets, right next to sat and tap.

If the shift is strong in your class, one simple option is to order the first sets like this. It's our suggestion from how the sound works, not a research rule.

You're not avoiding nasal words. You're making sure a child's first few wins don't depend on hearing /a/ on its own and then a different-sounding vowel in the blended word. Once they can blend, the mismatch stops bothering them.

How to model it

Say the sounds, then say the word the way you'd say it in the playground. Don't flatten man into a stiff crisp-a version so it "matches" the sound card. That teaches children that reading sounds different from talking, which is the opposite of what blending is for.

When you blend m-a-n and the word comes out a bit longer and higher, name it in passing: "Hear how it changed a little when I said it fast? That's normal."

And never correct a child's accent while they're reading. A Victorian Department of Education paper, Phonics and different English pronunciations (2023), asks teachers to acknowledge the varieties of English children bring and to favour an inclusive approach over rigid adherence to one set of sounds. University of Melbourne researchers Ahn and Sangster make the same case in the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (2026): phonics checks that rely on one pronunciation model risk scoring accent as a decoding problem.

The English phonics screening check, which the Australian Year 1 checks are modelled on, takes the same line: its guidance tells markers to allow for a child's regional accent, so a word decoded correctly in the child's own accent counts. You're judging whether they decoded it, not how they say the vowel. The Australian check's scoring rules say the same, which matters when you sort the misses into taught and not yet taught. For the reteach list itself, there's a separate piece on which sounds to reteach first.

Spelling: "men", "maen" and "cairmp"

Children spell what they hear. Treiman and Barry found this even in adults: British and American university students made spelling errors that matched their own accents. A six-year-old has far less spelling knowledge to fall back on.

So a child who writes men for man may be hearing exactly what the Northern Queensland study measured: the same vowel quality, only longer. A child who writes maen or cairmp is probably trying to show that longer, higher vowel with the vowel spellings they know. Australian English doesn't pronounce an r at the end of a syllable, so the r in cairmp isn't a stray r sound. It's a vowel spelling borrowed from air or car.

Treat it as good listening plus a spelling to reteach:

"You heard that long sound in camp. In camp, we write it with a."

A quick sort works well. Mix cat, bag, sat with camp, man, hand and ask which letter spells the vowel in all of them. The answer is always a.

The other a sounds that cause trouble

Schwa: "about", "banana" and the word "a"

In an unstressed syllable, Australian English often reduces a vowel to schwa, the "uh" in about and in both outside syllables of banana. That's why a Prep teacher might tell a teacher aide that "a can say uh". It's also why the word a, which many programmes teach as an early tricky word, is tricky: in a sentence we say "uh dog", not "ay dog".

Schwa sits in the Year 1 curriculum under understanding that a letter can represent more than one sound (AC9E1LY11). Programmes such as Phonics Plus and Literacy Hub teach schwa spellings explicitly later on. In Foundation there's nothing to fix.

"Dance", "castle" and "chance"

These change with where you grew up. Linguists Howard Manns and Felicity Cox, writing in The Conversation (2025), explain that South Australians tend to say dance and castle with the long "ah" of palm, while Tasmanians tend to keep the short a of trap. Brisbane and Sydney speakers mostly follow the Tasmanian pattern. Most Melbourne speakers use the short a, but some switch to "ah" when speaking formally.

So one class can easily hold both versions, and neither child is wrong. The spelling is a either way. A child who writes darnce gets the same response as the cairmp writer: you heard the vowel, here's how we spell it in this word.

When the programme audio uses a different accent

Plenty of phonics audio is recorded in British or American voices. The Victorian paper explains that the short a in bat and cat is said differently in British English than in Standard Australian English. It describes Jason, a six-year-old newly arrived from the UK, who decided cat didn't rhyme with bat when his Australian teacher modelled the vowel her way.

The fix runs both ways:

• Your voice is the model. If a recording sounds unlike your class, play it, then say the sound yourself and have the class copy you.
• Name it. "That speaker says it their way. We say it our way. Same letter."
• Check your key words. A picture word that works in a London accent might not work in yours. Pick one that does.
• Be flexible with rhymes. Some rhyming pairs only rhyme in some accents.

If you're building your own word lists

Most of this comes down to word choice in the first few weeks. Phonicspal builds lessons from the sounds your class has been taught, and you can swap any word out before it reaches the board, so am and man can wait until blending is steady. You can see how lesson planning works.