I disagree that the 'ow' as in cow and 'ou' as in house grapheme should be in the chart at all. From the way I understand THRASS and the number of sounds, the ou sound in this block is NOT one sound but two instead, and o as in glove and u as in quilt.

What is causing you some confusion is the fact that the 20 English vowel sounds are made up of three main types: short monophthongs (tongue stays still) such as represented by the letter 'a' at the start of "ant", long monophthongs (tongue stays still) such as represented by the two letters at the end of "car" and diphthongs (where the tongue moves) such as represented by the 'ow' in "cow". There are two movements to the articulation of the phoneme /ow/ but it is not made up of the short monophthong in glove and the consonant phoneme represented by the 'u' in quilt. If this were the case, and you were right, English phonics teaching worldwide would list the phonemes w/s as a consonant blend, as they presently do for say the s/t at the start of star, but they do not do this for w/s. The word "plough" is correctly taught as having three phonemes, that is, p-l-ough and the ough is treated as a quadgraph (quad). Plough and bough rhyme because they have the same diphthong /ow/ spelt 'o' 'u' 'g' 'h' but nothing to do with 'water wheel quilt' on the THRASS charts.

In summmary, your thinking is good but you need to consider that "how, now, brown, cow" all rhyme because they end with the same vowel phoneme - not because the have the sound represented by the 'w' in water.

USEFUL RESOURCE:

THRASS Phoneme Machine, which is a £10 (sterling) software programme that breaks all 500 English basewords into their phonemes - which you can recreate, using the Phoneme Grid (the grid with the 44 phoneme-boxes). Mouse can be recreate by visiting three not four boxes. At present the Dualdisc with the trial version is free but this is only until the end of December 2006, when the price of the software is to be increased.

Ask Alan

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