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?
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.
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.
