Yes, There ARE Patterns in English Spelling

[Music] in this session we're going to take a look at English spelling I developed this session as a result of watching a brand new teacher tackle English spelling an English spelling question from a student and I really wasn't too happy with the response so a student put up his hand and he said excuse me teacher why is such and such words spelled this way and the teacher just threw up her hands and said oh that's just the way it is you just have to memorize it and to my mind even though that's true for some words in English because they're very unique in terms of their spelling to my mind that was not a good way to answer the question so I decided let's dig a little bit more deeply into English spelling and how we can tackle it as teachers in a more systematic way so that's the origin of this session and that's what it's all about we're going to start the session by taking a look at why learning English spelling is actually important for our students then we're going to take a look at what spelling actually is so we'll look at a definition of spelling and what's involved in learning to spell we'll take a look at some of the patterns that do actually exist with English spelling so we'll take a look at the patterns that we can teach our students so that spelling is a much easier thing for them to learn then we'll have some fun and take a look at the historical reasons that have created the English spelling system as it is today and finally we'll wrap up the session with a look at some teaching activities and teaching strategies to use with their swith your students so that they can become good spellers [Music] many teachers and many students for that matter think that learning how to spell in English is actually not important anymore and why is this because a lot of our language production in written form is done using word processing software such as Microsoft Word and as we all know word processing software has a spell check function in it we had a nice little squiggly line underneath the word that says hey this words not correct and we click on it and it brings up brings up different choices and we pick the choice we need well I no need for spelling unfortunately this is not a good approach to take first of all the spell checks in the word processing software don't always catch all the mistakes that we make so we may actually have a word that's spelled correctly but we know in English that there are quite a number of words that are sold multiple ways and they mean different things so we could have a word that is correct but it's actually the wrong word and if we don't know how to spell we're not going to pick these mistakes up so spellcheck is not infallible that's the very first reason that we need to teach our students how to spell the computer and software tools at our disposal are not at our disposal are not perfect the second reason and this is more important we're getting into the more important stuff here the second reason that spelling is really important for our students is that there's a substantial body of research that says good spellers are good readers so we want our students to be able to read English well and one of the skills in order to be able to read English well is to be able to spell well so good spellers make good readers and on the productive side we've got the same issue going on and the research shows this as well good spellers make good writers okay so the better that our students can spell the better they can write the more fluently they can write the more productively they can write and the more cohesive and layered their writing is so to really good reasons here to teach our students how to spell good spellers our good readers and good spellers are good writers there are still more reasons to teach our students how to spell there's another really good body of research that says good spellers use a wider range of vocabulary when they are writing and also when they're speaking so the more words you can spell and therefore the more words you feel comfortable with the more words you will use when you're producing the language so there's a another piece to this as well the wider the range of vocabulary you use the better able you you are to express yourself in English so good spellers have a wider range of vocabulary at their disposal and therefore have a wider range of ideas and details that they can communicate here's the final reason to teach our students spelling in the professional world and actually in a lot of different aspects of daily life good spellers are perceived very differently than bad spellers good spellers are perceived to be intelligent capable and professional bad spellers unfortunately are perceived to be the complete opposite they're perceived to be incompetent unintelligent and unprofessional so we want our students to be perceived to their fullest ability so if our students are capable we want them to be perceived that way and one of the tools we can give them to build up that perception is to make them good spellers you might think well it's not fair to judge people on their spelling to judge people's intelligence on their spelling or their professionalism or their capabilities and that's very true it's not fair but the reality is is this is what human beings do this is what we do as people when we see a piece of writing from someone we make judgments about their professionalism their intelligence and their capabilities based on the spelling so we don't want to put our students in the position of being negatively perceived because they can't spell we want to put them in the position of being professionally perceived because they can spell so these are all really really good reasons to get spelling into our lessons on at least a weekly basis and if possible upon a daily basis [Music] you might think that spelling is just a very simple word to define we take the right letters and we put them in the right order in order to create the word that we want to convey with our writing that's very true but we're gonna dig into the definition of spelling a little bit more so that we can start to figure out what knowledge and what skills do our students actually need in order to be able to spell well here's a definition of spelling that I like and why I like it is it's clear it's concise and it starts to draw out the different concepts that we need to focus on when it comes to teaching our students how to spell so spelling is the application of phonemic awareness and alphabet awareness to letters in an orthographic or writing system and if I were to make it even more precise I would add the word systematic in front of application so it's a systematic application of phonemic awareness and alphabet awareness to letters in an orthographic or writing system let's take a look at the pieces of this definition so that we can start to figure out what do our students actually need to know in order to be able to spell so the first piece of this definition is phonemic awareness so this means that students need to actually be able to identify and hopefully produce the sounds or the phonemes of that particular language so right away we can see why some learners of English might have challenges when spelling in English if they can't actually identify the different phonemes in the language they won't be able to spell the words in the language so a classic example that comes to mind is a difference between Japanese and English so in Japanese there is no phonemic differentiation between an L sound and ol or an R sound earth but we know in English we do have this differentiation so many Japanese students of English have a great deal of trouble spilling words like light versus right because they actually can't differentiate those two phonemes so phoneme awareness or phonemic awareness is the first step in order to be able to spell in English the next piece that students need to know in order to be able to spell in English is alphabet awareness or alphabetic awareness and this means that students can identify the different letters so we know there are 26 letters in English so students can identify them and name them so identify them they can recognize okay this is an A versus this is a C and then name them they can give the names to the letters and then finally they can actually produce the letters and this gives us another area where some of our ASL students might have challenges if our students come from a background a language background that does not use a Roman based off of that then they're not going to come at the English language with that background knowledge of a Roman alphabet so they'll have to start right back at the beginning and build their alphabetic awareness so they'll have to learn this is an a this is a B this is a CD this is a D and so on okay then there's another profile of student that this this piece of spelling might also create challenges for and that's a profile of student who is not literate at all in his or her first language so the student doesn't even have any concept that letters exist or that any writing system or script system exists even if it's a different system they don't even know that that exists so we've got these two profiles of students we've got the students who come from a language background that has a non Roman alphabet writing system and then we have students who have never even learned the alphabetic system or the writing system in their own language so they are illiterate in their first language and then trying to make a jump to literacy in their second language English is a massive massive jump for them to make and the final piece that our students need to know in order to be able to spell is what we call orthographic awareness and this is the idea that Stu know that you have sounds and then you have an alphabet or a visual representation of those sounds and that you can map the visual representation on to the sounds or vice versa the sounds onto the visual representation so connecting phonemic awareness and alphabetical awareness or alphabetic awareness I keep messing up that word alphabetic awareness is called orthographic awareness it's being able to map the sounds map the sounds using the letters and this is where English presents massive challenges because we don't have this very clear relationship between our phonemic awareness and our alphabetic awareness so the sound systems don't very directly map one to the other as we'll look at look at in a bit more detail and this is also an area in which once again students who are not literate in their first language will have problems because they just can't conceptualize that you can take sounds and represent them visually that you can do this mapping process so orthographic awareness is the third piece of the puzzle when it comes to learning how to spell the knowledge students need in order to be able to spell very well and use English at a much more complex level doesn't actually stop at phonemic awareness alphabetic awareness and orthographic awareness those are the foundational skills as students become more proficient at English they actually need to add more skills to their overall skill set in order to be able to spell effectively so here's some of the additional skills that students need to layer on - those three foundational skills or levels of awareness so they need to add on an understanding of morphemes so morphemes if you recall from other learning that you've done morphemes are the smallest unit of meaning in a language and there is often a connection between a morpheme and then how a word is spelled so if I take a word and divide it up into its morphemes I can start to see some patterns in terms of how those units of meaning are represented visually with the spelling system so morphemic awareness adds a layer to my ability to be my ability to spell another set of knowledge that is useful when it comes to spelling is knowledge of syllables so phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language but we can put phonemes together to create syllables and syllables are sound units and their units of sound they're the two pieces within a syllable are sounds that very frequently go together in a language and syllables can create a rhythm to the language okay and so the knowledge of syllables helps our students understand which sounds can go together to create a unit of sound in a language so which phonemes can we put together in order to create a unit of sound in a language and if we can't put these phonemes together then we know that we can't spell a word a particular way so you can look at different languages and right away you can start to pick up some of the combinations of sounds that go together in order to create syllables in that language so syllable knowledge is also really important for our students the next layer of knowledge that our students need to add on in order to be able to spell well is grammatical and syntactical knowledge so knowledge of grammar and knowledge of syntax knowledge of grammar and knowledge of syntax helps our students figure out if they've got the correct word in the correct place in a sentence and if it is the correct word it also gives them hints about how that word should be spelled the classic example would be if the student is using the simple past of a regular verb that student will know that usually the end with a regular verb the ending of that word will be spelled deep so this is a very simple example of where knowledge of grammar will help our students spell more easily and spell correctly and finally knowledge of meaning so semantic awareness will help our students learn to spell or be good spellers now this is semantic awareness at the word level the phrase level the sentence level the text level the discourse level and so on so at all levels of meaning the more our students can understand the meanings of words in different contexts the better they'll actually be able to spell because then they will understand okay I've got the correct word for this particular situation and therefore here's how I spell it this is mostly helpful very helpful actually when it comes to words that sound the same but are spelled differently okay and have different meanings so this is really where semantic awareness comes into the picture when students have multiple words that sound the same and they have to pick the right word based on the word meaning as opposed to the word sound so that's the final layer of additional knowledge above and beyond those three foundational levels of awareness that our students need to have in order to be able to spell well so as you can see there's a lot of layers of knowledge involved in being a good speller the last piece that we need to look at when it comes to defining spelling and uncovering the different bodies of knowledge that our students need to have in order to spell well use the actual process that we go through when we're spelling a word so how do we take a word that we know the sound of and then represent it visually in our writing system and there's two processes that we can use we can use a process called phonological processing and we can use a process called orthographic processing so let's take a look at phonological processing first phonological processing is simply the process by which we take a sound and then we represent it with a letter and so we work through the word from start to finish and we pick out all the sounds in the word and then we match each of the sounds with the corresponding letter and voila we spelled the word so for example let's take the word and okay so the first sound I got is a p-- so I'm going to use the letter A and then I've got mmm so I'm going to use the letter n and then I've got duck so I'm going to use the letter D so I've just gone through a phonological processing process you know to spell the word and I start with the sounds I match the letters up and then I just worked my way through my word from start to finish you might have heard the term phonics audience is a way to teach spelling to students both first language speakers of English and second or third language speakers of English that is based upon phonological processing so in phonics we seek to identify the sounds and then we identify the letters that can represent those different sounds so if you see a textbook that has a phonics approach to teaching spelling they are using phonological processing where they're tapping into phonological processing in order to teach students how to spell the second approach that students can use in order to spell is called orthographic processing in orthographic processing instead of breaking a word apart into its individual sounds we actually sort of take a mental photograph of the word and we memorize what the word looks like so we treat the word as if it were a picture and we remember okay this is the picture of the word and this is exactly what it looks like and then we basically repre mind of the word we just put it on paper so this is orthographic processing so it's meant a much more visual approach to spelling we're basically taking snapshots or photographs of every single word and then reproducing them when we write or when you type you may have heard the term the whole word approach when it comes to teaching and learning spelling the whole word approach taps into orthographic processing so in the whole word approach we teach students to create a visual image in their heads so to take a snapshot or a picture of a word and then as soon as they see that word they know what it is so the students are basically creating a massive photo album in their heads so to speak of all of the words in English and then they reproduce them when they write or when they type and you'll see the whole word approach to teaching spelling in action when you see students working with flashcards so they'll be the entire word spelled out on the flashcard students hold it up identify that the word very quickly well the next one up identify that word and so just very quickly they tap into this photo album that they have in their heads of what the different words look like so which process to students use and which process did you use when you are learning English and the answer is you might have used two processes or you might have just used one process so you might have used both Quanah logical processing and orthographic processing together okay and so you might have learned through phonics and through the whole word approach and you might still do this today so the combination of phonological processing and orthographic processing is actually the best process to use when spelling in English because first of all the phonological piece allows you to deal with new words that you've never seen before so you can take these new words and you can figure out based on the letters what the possible sounds are or you can hear a new word and then you can figure out okay here's probably how it's spelled by breaking it down on a sound by sound basis so phonological processing really allows us to deal with and to manage new words the orthographic processing however is extremely efficient because if we can just instantaneously access this photograph of words that we've got in our heads we can read and we can spell very very quickly so we use orthographic processing for the short high-frequency and very familiar words so if we put phonological processing together with orthographic processing we get an extremely efficient and productive spelling system going for ourselves we get a system by which we can handle new words through phonological processing and we get a system by which we can spell and access words very very quickly through orthographic processing however there are some people who try to spell just using orthographic processing and you can see where this creates problems okay so they these these types of people they just look at the words as individual pictures and then they store masses and masses and masses of words in their heads and then just access these pictures this is problematic for a few reasons first of all if you just spell using orthographic processing you have absolutely no way to handle words that are brand new words that you've either never heard before or you've never seen written before so new words create a really big problem if you rely solely on orthographic processing then orthographic processing is also problematic because English has literally hundreds of thousands of words in it and if you try to store all of those hundreds of thousands of words in your brain your access of words slows down if you only rely on orthographic processing for high frequency words then you're going to be very very fast at accessing those words but if you rely on orthographic processing for all of your words you're accessing is going to be a lot slower so even though some people do rely solely on orthographic processing the research research does show that that is not the most efficient or effective way to spell so the combination of phonological processing and orthographic processing is the way to go and that's what we want to do with our students [Music] our students know the phonemes of English and they know the letters that go in the English alphabet so then what do they need to learn they need to learn how those two pieces fit together so how do we map the sounds onto the letters or the letters onto the sounds so remember this is called orthographic awareness and this is where the challenge arises with English we're going to introduce another concept here and it's called phony Missa tee mone Missa tee is a degree to which there is a closed or direct relationship between the letters of the languages writing system and the sounds of that writings of that language so do we have one letter equals one sound and one sound equals one letter or as in English do we have one letter equals perhaps three or four sounds or one sound is represented by perhaps three or four different letters or letter combinations so if a language has high phony Missa tee then there is a very closer direct relationship between its sounds and its letters if it has low phony Missa tee then there is not such a direct relationship or multiple relationships between letters and sounds so you guessed it English has low phony Missa tee that means there's not a clear relationship between letters and sounds and this is where the challenge comes for students of English this low phony Missa tee of English presents a huge challenge when it comes to reading English reading English and spelling words another way to look at this issue of how sounds and letters map on to each other is with the terms transparent orthography versus opaque orthography transparent orthography is when there is a direct relationship between a letter and a sound so there is one letter and that represents one sound or there is one sound represented by one letter so that's transparent orthography on the other hand there is opaque orthography and this is a language where there is not a very clear relationship or it's an fake relationship between the letters and the sounds so there might be one sound represented by three or four different letters or vice versa and once again English is in this opaque orthography category so there is not that clear relationship between the letters and the sounds an example of a language with transparent orthography would once again be the languages of Spanish and Italian for example raiders of English can have a lot of fun with this lack of direct connection between letters and sounds in English or this apparent lack I will show you there are connections however so writers can have a lot of fun with the fact that we have one letter that represents multiple sounds or one sound represented by different letter combinations so I'm going to read you a poem and this is a classic example of how we can have fun with this opaque orthography in English but this is not the only example but it's a fun one so let me read you a poem called the chaos that pokes fun at the opaque orthography of English dearest creature in creation studying English pronunciation I will teach you in my verse sounds like corpse core hoarse and worse I will keep you suzy busy make your head with heat grow dizzy tear in eye your dress you'll tear so shall i oh hear my prayer if you take a look at this poem you'll notice that the sounds and letter combinations highlighted by the author really focus on the fact that we've got different ways of representing the same sound and different letters that represent different sounds so you can find more of this poem it's actually got multiple verses to it if you just google the chaos you'll find the entire poem on the internet and it features more and more and more of these fun letters sound anomalies so our challenges teachers when it comes to helping our students become good spellers is to help them see the logic in this open orthography of English so we need to help them start to see the patterns in what looks like chaos and there are patterns so the first thing we can do with our students to help them to start to see patterns or to start to understand this opaque orthography is to make sure they're familiar with three kinds of words or three categories of words and these are homophone x' homographs and hominins and I'll get take you through the definitions of each of these and they'll help you explain to students some of the variations that they see when it comes to letter sound combinations the first category of words are homophone x' Homa phones are words that sound the same so they have the same pronunciation but they mean something different and they may or may not be spelled differently so here are two examples air in air so they said it sounds like I'm saying the same word but air hei R means one thing and then air a IR means something different and these happen to be spelled differently another example is the word red are other words red and red the first red I have in mind when I'm saying it is re ad so the past tense of the verb to read the second word I have in my head when I say red is the color so our II D so these are home of phones holographs are words that are spelled the same but they have a different meaning and usually a different origin they may or may not be pronounced the same so here are some examples of homographs first we have the word bear de AR meaning to carry and then the word bear as in the animal be e AR also and then we have the words led le ad and we can pronounce this lead to conduct or we can pronounce it lead as in the metal but they're spelled the same so homographs words that are spelled the same but have a different meaning and finally homonyms are words that are both homophones and graphs so they sound the same and they're spelled the same but they have a different meaning here's an example let's take the word el eam so it's spelled el eam and we pronounce it lean but I can have two meanings so we've got two words here we've got the verb to prop something against so I leaned the book up against the counter and then we've got the word that describes a person who doesn't have a lot of fat on him or her so a lean person usually has a lot of muscle and it's quite athletic so that's two words but they are spelled the same and they sound the same but they have two different meanings so these are homonyms so the concepts homophones homographs and homonyms help us to start to categorize the different patterns that we see when it comes to English words and how they're represented visually so they're useful just in terms of categorizing but they don't they don't really help us when it comes to understanding where the different patterns come from so we're gonna move on to that let's take a look at the historical origins or the reasons for all of these different patterns so why do we have homophones and homographs and homonyms why do we have an opaque orthography why do we have an English low funny Missa tee but before we start to take a look at these historical origins of English spelling there is something that's worth noting English orthography is not quite as opaque as you might think if you were just to take a quick glance at the language so when new learners of English take a quick look at it at the spelling system they're like oh my god there's no patterns here what's going on however the opaqueness of English orthography is a bit of an illusion and here's the reason English is high frequency words are also it's most irregular words so most of the irregularity in terms of English spelling comes in our high frequency words so high frequency words are words that we use very often when we're speaking when we're writing and unfortunately these are the words that have the irregularity when it comes to spelling so when we look at the language and there's a lot of these high frequency words in there we think oh this is a really opaque orthography but when we look at the totality of all English words and including high frequency low frequency then the opaqueness of the spelling actually lessens so there's a smaller percentage of irregularity in the entirety of English vocabulary than there is in that set of high frequency words so this doesn't lessen the challenge of spelling but it does make it seem a little bit more manageable so let's start by taking a look at some of the historical origins of some of these patterns that we see when it comes to English spelling the first thing when we take a look at the history of English that really jumps out is that English has been influenced by many many different languages so English started out as a Germanic language anglo-saxon but then through subsequent invasions and historical events different languages came in and very significantly influenced the English language as well so we started out with anglo-saxon and then there was Norse influence when the Vikings with a Scandinavian language came into England and then there was both French and a Latin influence so the Latin influence came through two events one was the invasion of the Roman Empire they brought Latin then and then there was a secondary wave of Latin coming into the language when Roman Catholicism came to England so two influences of Latin and then there was a very significant influence of French which itself has Latin a Latin bass with the Norman evasion of the Norman Conquest of English and with this event French became the language of the high courts and English remained the language of the lesser people or the lower classes and so French significantly influenced the English language when you when we had this ruling class using the French language and so French language filter down and influenced English now there was also a significant influence from Greek with the Renaissance and Greek learning and Greek thinking coming into play and then finally there there's been a myriad of influences from other languages because English is what's called a borrowing language so English pulls in words from all different languages so whenever speakers of English encounter another language and there isn't a good word in that language for a specific item or object or event then English just borrows the word so there are thousands of borrowed words in English that come from all the different language groups that English speakers have encountered over the years and as we know the English language was used in colonizing when British colonizers went out into the world to conquer territory and take over territory and so English as a language encountered many other languages because of that so there are many many influences from other languages and English is this borrower language so we that's just a very very quick history of the different language groups that have influenced that original Anglo Saxon but you can see it's a significant number and also the impact of those languages themselves what's very significant each of these languages that influenced English left evidence of that influence in our spelling and so there are certain patterns that researchers have determined go back to a specific language influence so let's take a look at some of these will start with Norse so here's some North spelling patterns so the first one is ght so we've got the words slaughter slight and tight all have ght in them this goes back to Norse another padding that goes back to Norse is wh so wheeze near the worl yeah the other one is WR wreck yeah wrong and there are still more so the hard cuts ound in kid killed him Kindle all come from Norse and the hard SK so the socks are the s and then the hard K spelled with SC also comes from Norse so scab scale scare score and scout and then finally the K in combination in knife and me has been traced back to Norse there are literally hundreds of Latin and French spelling patterns in English and here here are just a few examples so the C tion combination so faction action satisfaction auction rejection diction those are all Latin French in origin then the a tion combination nation aviation calculation cancellation the Li a are combination familiar peculiar also comes from the Latin French and as does ary so necessary ordinary secretary and finally the nai re combination as a millionaire and questionnaire also comes from Latin French these are this is just a very small number but there are many many many that come from Latin French and here are some Greek spelling patterns so the th sound a lot of our ths come from Greek so anthology anthropology arithmetic athlete authentic enthusiastic ether ethic marathon method myth theater theme and the pH also comes from Greek philosophy photography phobia graph audiophile the really strange combination of pH th is another Greek spelling pattern diphtheria diphthong ophthalmic the hy is another Greek one him hygiene hysteria hydro hyper and finally the au combination aura austere authentic scent or nausea so quite a few Greek origin spelling patterns there it's really fascinating to take a look at how many words have a specific spelling pattern and thankfully the Internet now has some really good tools for us so we can do quick searches and find all the words that have a specific spelling pattern in them so we've given you two really good websites on your handout that allow you simply to put in a spelling pattern or a letter pattern and then the site will generate a list of all the words that have that pattern this is good just for interest sake so you can see how widespread a particular pattern is but it's also really useful for your students because you can generate lists of words that follow that specific pattern and this really helps students understand here are the patterns in the language and then you can backtrack and share the historical origin of those patterns besides the influences of these languages on English there are other historical events that also influenced the spelling patterns that we see today in English I'm not an expert upon the history of the English language so I'm just gonna really quickly take you through key events or key occurrences that influenced English spelling and then I'll provide you with good resources to look at if you want to really delve into the history of English and I suggest you do because it's really fascinating the first historical event that influences English going to this day is the fact that we use the Latin alphabet so the adoption of the Latin alphabet to represent English visually was a historical event that created some let's say interesting challenges for people who wanted to write English down the fundamental challenge is that the English alphabet only has five vowels because Latin has five vowel sounds okay and it has twenty-one consonants because Latin has twenty-one consonant sounds however English has many more vowel sounds than five and it also has more consonant sounds than twenty-one so depending on the dialect of English that you're speaking there are between 14 and 16 vowel sounds and there are between 24 and 26 consonant sounds so we've got this alphabet that has five of five vowels vowel letters and twenty-one consonants letters but then we've got a language that has 14 to 16 vowel sounds and 24 to 26 consonant sounds so we don't have enough letters to represent the sounds that exist in the language so what do we do so this is where people writing the language down started to create different combinations for to represent the sounds that there was not a letter for so this is the first historical event that created challenges right from the get-go for English spelling the adoption or the use of the Latin alphabet to represent English the next historical fact it's not really an event but it's a situation that created the English spelling challenges we have today is the fact that English was put into written form by many different people so it was not just a single person or even a group of people working to collectively at the same time that put English into its written form English was put into its written form by many different people often functioning in isolation and given this Latin alphabet challenge each individual scribe made different choices when it comes to representing the sounds that did not have when it came to representing the sounds that did not have a direct letter associated with it so each scribe made different decisions when it came to writing English down and so we had all this variation in terms of how sounds were represented so you can just and visualize most of these scribes worked for the church so you can tell invision monks sitting in a monastery somewhere transcribing English into its written form and then trying to make these sound decisions when it came to which letters do I use to represent these sounds so this scribing in isolation created a lot of the variation that we see today the next piece of history that influenced English spelling was really a historical event and this was the advent of the printing press so previously we just had individual scribes writing in isolation when it came to putting English into written form with the printing press what we could now have is many many many copies of a single piece of writing being produced by one person or one organization so it made it much easier to standardize the written form that went out to people to read yeah then to copy however there were some challenges with the advent of the printing press so instead of individual scribes making letter and spelling decisions now it was the owners of the printing presses or the people running the printing presses and here's where an interesting twist comes in to English spelling in England the majority of the people who ran and owned printing presses were actually Belgian in origin so they actually made spelling choices related to the language the face book which was Flemish which is a variation which is a Germanic language so a lot of our spelling decisions were made by these people putting these printing presses together or running these printing presses so instead of individual scribes now we have printing press owners and printing press operators making our spelling decisions so we had a lot of standardization because they would print hundreds of copies but we still had variation because each owner was making a different spelling choice for different words the next historical event that influenced the spelling of English is called the great vowel shift and even though it sounds like it's a short event it actually happened over several hundred years and the great vowel shift is an interesting thing that happened speakers of English shifted the range of vowels that they used and so short vowels became longer and longer Vale's turned into diphthongs so there was this entire shift of the spectrum of vowel sounds in English I am NOT an expert on the great vowel shift but I will provide you with information to look at or resources to look at if you want to dig into this but the whole gist of the great vowel shift is that we shifted our vowel sounds along the vowel spectrum and created new diphthongs and elongated vowel sounds that were previously shorter and so our pronunciation particularly our vowels no longer matched how we wrote them and unfortunately this event happened after the printing press so the printing press came along and we started to standardize English spelling and then unfortunately this big vowel shift happened and our spelling in particular our spelling of vowels no longer matched how we spelled them so or how we said them so we kind of standardized vowel spelling with the printing press and then unfortunately we shifted all of our vowel sounds with the great vowel shift and so we had this mismatch now between how we wrote the vowels and how we said them and unfortunately there was never any corresponding shift in how we spelled our vowels to correspond with this great vowel shift and as I said the bow shift happened after the printing press so if you're interested interested in this and I suggest you do because it's really fascinating do some research on the great vowel shift and you'll see how this influenced the spelling that we have today there have been various initiatives throughout the history of English to change the spelling so we have the great vowel shift and then English continued to develop and then over the the years different initiatives took place to change English spelling and there's three main initiatives and they happen in different countries at different times and some of them have happened multiple times and some of these initiatives are still ongoing so the first initiative that happened was an attempt to go back to the historical spellings of some words so this was particularly true of Latin based words so over time Latin based words actually lost their Latin spelling but then there was this initiative at the academic level to shift our spelling back to indicate those Latin roots of the words and the classic example here is the word debt DBT so after initially the word was spelled DBT because that was the Latin but then what happened is the B was dropped because it was no longer said but net then there was this initiative to go back to the historical roots of the word and the B was actually put back in and the same thing happened with PT combinations that had read Latin roots as well so over time different groups have put these initiatives in place to restore historical spellings of words regardless of how we now say in it so that's one initiative another initiative that has taken place and quite frankly is still ongoing he's an initiative to standardize spelling so ya recall that I said different individuals scribes came up with different spellings and different printing press operators came up with different spellings so then there were initiatives to standardize all of these spellings and come to agreement okay here's how we're going to spell this word and the big drive for standardized spelling really came when dictionaries were written so different dictionary writers spent years and years and years pulling together dictionaries of English words and their corresponding spellings and at this time there was this attempt to standardize spellings so there were multiple spellings of words out there and then dictionary makers tried to get some standardization in there and this continues today you know you've got different dialects of English that have different spellings of words and there's debate okay which is the correct spelling and so there is this ongoing initiative to keep standardized spelling in place with different English words in the final initiative that started quite frankly with American spelling and the original writing of the first american dictionary is the initiative to standardize spelling to sound so over time our pronunciation of different words changed and as you know how we spell the word no longer matches how we say it so there have been initiatives and the very first noticeable one was with the first american dictionary but these are not going to match the sound of the word - the spelling of the word and this is actually one of the foundational reasons for the differences that we see in the spelling of American English versus British English for example the American English Spelling's aligned or they tried to align those spellings more closely to sound and this may meant that they were spelled differently than the corresponding words in British English but this initiative is ongoing yeah we'll see this with different spellings that come into into play for example texting is actually a really interesting place to see this initiative at work by users of the language in texting will get representations of words that are exactly spelled exactly how they sound so for example the word through thr ough when we text it as thr you so we're there's certain user groups that are going more towards let's just type or write that spell this word exactly how it sounds so this is an ongoing piece in terms of English spelling how do we align the spelling more closely with the sound so these are three initiatives that have been ongoing and they they kind of cycle around and at different times one initiative is more powerful than the other and so on but they have overtime influenced English spelling so hopefully you can see through this very brief history and as I said I am NOT an expert on this but I will give you some resources to look at this very brief history let's you know just the strength of historical influences on English spelling it didn't come out of nowhere so you know when you look at how different words are spelled there's a reason for the spelling of every single word that you see and the reason lies in the history of the language I promised you some resources that allow you to dig much more deeply into the history of the English language and the history of spelling so here they are on your handout you'll see two YouTube videos that I really recommend the first one is the history of English in ten minutes a little bit of a warning there are some rude bits in this presentation or in this video but it's really funny but it and it's all really informative so my apologies for the roof it's but it's definitely worth looking at this video the second video is a more formal and obviously a lengthier look at the history of the English language but it's also worth taking a look at and there are also two really good print resources out there David crystal is a renowned linguist and he has delved into english spelling with a few of his books but i'm the best one in my mind anyway yes one called spell it out that's a fairly recent publication so david Crystal's spell it out take a look at and then there's a work by christopher upward and George Davidson I believes the authors are and it's simply called the history of English spelling this is a much more detailed look at the history of all of the different spelling patterns that we have in the English language so it's not quite as entertaining to read as David Crystal David Crystal is a very entertaining author but this one is much more comprehensive and so if there's a particular spelling pattern that you want to know the background of that's the book to look into and there are other resources out there if you just go on to an online bookseller and Google history of English or history English spelling you'll pull up some other resources but these are the two that I recommend now you know the historical background that has created the English spelling that we see today so there is logic behind why we spell things the way we do and there are patterns behind how we spell things the way we do but the problem we've got or the challenge we've got is there have been so many influences on the language and that has correspondingly created many different patterns so the real challenge when it comes to learning English spelling is really learning all of the different patterns that are out there so it's not a question of memorizing what every single word looks like but it's a question of learning the different patterns that are very frequently used in different words and to add interest for our students it's always fun to bring in history of those patterns so this is a North Face pattern or this is a Latin based pattern so really look to teach your students the patterns of spelling and also for fun a little bit of the history behind that spelling so this brings us to our next topic how do we actually teach spelling to our students so we know it's important to teach spelling and we know that there are patterns there to teach and we know there's a history behind those patterns but how do we actually teach spelling in our classes there are essentially four different ways that we can approach teaching spelling to our students the first one is just incidental so a student spells a word incorrectly and you as the teacher provide the correction so we teach spelling as errors occur with our students this is always an approach that we're going to tap into because we want our students to create accurate work but it's not the primary strategy or primary approach that we should rely on when we're teaching spelling so incidental has its place but there's more that we need to be looking at the next approach and this is probably the most frequently use not necessarily the best as we'll see is an approach that simply is first of all targeted so we very strategically introduce spelling into our lessons either once a lesson or once a week or twice a week but it's a targeted approach that teaches spelling on a word by word basis so we start our students with the less complex words and the more frequently used words and we work them up to more complex words and less frequently used words so we see this approach in graded spelling textbooks so there's a spelling list of the easiest words and the more difficult and more difficult and more difficult and so on if you're a native speaker of English you would have learned spelling possibly this way you would have had a list of grade 1 spelling words and a list of grade 2 spelling words on a list of grade 3 spelling words and so on so using a targeted approach going from least complex complex words up to more complex words is one way to approach spelling but here's another approach that really taps into the patterns so if we're using a targeted approach based on word complexity what we're not really giving our students an appreciation of is the patterning that does exist in spelling so what another approach to to use to we bring these patterns to the forefront used to use a targeted approach to teaching spelling but it's targeted based on letter patterns so rather than going on a word by word basis we're going on a pattern basis so you're going to start by introducing your students to the most frequently used patterns of word combinations and then obviously move them up to the less frequently used patterns of letters why is this a good approach it's a good approach because it starts to bring a little bit of order to spelling in English it starts to get students to understand that there are patterns and there are co-occurring combinations of letters and if they know these combinations they have a much better chance of spelling accurately than if they don't know these combinations so this is an approach that I really recommend targeted by letter combination and there's another approach that's also very effective it's another targeted approach so we're being very strategic about how we teach spelling and it occurs in our lessons regularly but this one is targeted by sound so rather than teaching spelling the word or letter combination sorry what we're gonna do is look at a sound and then get students to understand the different combinations of letters that represent that sound okay so if we take the sound ah then we'll take a look at okay what are all the combinations of letters that create that a sound now we can look at the an sound or the cuss and/or the sound whichever sounds we want to target so this is another approach here's the sound and then here are all of the letters that can represent that sound in English spelling once again this is a really good approach because it starts to allow students to uncover the patterning in English they start to understand the pattern of here's the sound and then hear the possible letter combinations that represent that sound earlier in the session we talked about phonemic processing and orthographic processing and their corresponding methodologies of phonics and whole word we can use we can map these different targeted approaches that we've just talked about to this terminology that we introduced earlier so an orthographic processing or a whole word approach is the same as taking a targeted approach to teaching spelling with word lists so we prepare these word lists from the least complex to most complex and students basically memorize each word as a picture the phonemic processing and the phonics approach map onto the other tube targeted approaches to teaching spelling in our classroom where we're looking at letter patterns and sound patterns so these all kind of relate to each other in terms of how we approach spelling in the classroom the strongest approach is to combine the different approaches so that students can come out spelling from different angles the traditional approach is the word list approach but please don't just rely on that because then your students don't get this appreciation and understanding of these patterns that exist in English spelling so make sure you include the targeted letter patterns or letter combinations and a targeted sound approach to teaching spelling hopefully by now you have an understanding that spelling is not something that we can either ignore in our language classroom or just hope that our students pick up naturally we have to have a really clear picture in our minds about how we're going to approach spelling and there's kind of four things to keep in mind when you're putting together spelling activities and spelling lessons the first thing is that you do need to take a systematic approach to teaching spelling okay students aren't just gonna miraculously learn it so have a clear picture in your own mind of the system that you're going to use in order to teach students a spelling another element to successful teaching of spelling is to make sure that students get immediate corrective feedback they need to know right away that their spelling is not correct so this either involves them noticing in a word processing program when they've got that in high squiggly line underneath the word or it involves the teacher giving some kind of feedback or an online activity or computer-based activity that provides immediate feedback so immediate corrective feedback is your second Pease your third piece is making sure your students get a lot of practice that means repeated repeated repeated practice it takes a lot of work a lot of practice in order for students to learn how to spell correctly so you need to provide them with that practice opportunity either in class or as homework assignments and the last element to teaching spelling is one that this whole session is kind of putting forward you have to teach the patterns if you don't take a patterned approach your students simply will not understand where these letter combinations come from where the sound letter relationships come from you have to go for the patterning so what we're going to do is take a look at different activities that you can do with students that hit all of these four elements particularly this idea that you have to start pointing patterns out to students so that they can master the English spelling I'm going to describe a variety of activities that you can use in your classroom to start to get your students to notice these patterns in English spelling so here's the first one in this activity what you're going to do is make a list of words that all have the same letter combinations in them so and pick a letter combination that you're going to focus on so in this activity we'll focus on the o u combination so give your students a list of a whole bunch of words that have oh you in them enough through and so on then students have the job of grouping the words together according to the similarity of the sound that is represented by those two letters oh you so I've given you a list of words you know have you tried this here's a list of words that all have mu in them see if you can figure out or group them according to the sound that the OU's represent and then see if you can label those sounds if you know you're fronting the kalfa bet with the corresponding sound that those letters represent not as easy as it looks is it here the answers you should have grouped the words into six groups and so there are six corresponding vowel sounds represented by oh you within this larger set of oh you words here are the answers you can do this activity for any combination of letters obviously the more challenging combinations are those that have more sounds associated with them so save those for your higher levels but for your lower levels pick combinations of letters that just have two or three different sounds associated with them so this is the first activity give students letter combinations in different words and then they have to identify the sounds that those letter combinations represent the second activity is kind of the reverse of the first activity in the second activity what students have to do is group of words present it according to whether they have the same sound in them and in order to do that they kind of have to realize that the sound where the sounds are represented by different letter combinations this time so we're not looking at the same letter combination we're looking at different letter combinations representing the same sound so take a look at these words and group them or put them in pairs or threes according to the words that have the same sound within in this case it's the same vowel sound this is also not quite as easy as it sounds so here are the pairings of words that you should have and these words are paired because they have the same vowel sound regardless of the letters that are representing that vowel sound here's the next activity activity 3 in this activity you give the students a reading text and it should be a text that's at their language proficiency level and with words that they know and students are given one of two tasks so there's two variations the first task you can give them is to identify or circle all of the words that have a specific letter combination so for example they have to find all of the ght words in the text or all of the ary words in the text once they've identified these patterns they then have to figure out what's the sound that goes with those letter patterns and then the other variation is kind of the opposite so students get the text and then they have to circle or identify words that have a specific sound in them so for example you might give students the task of finding all of the words that have at in them students then have to circle those words and then they have to figure out or identify the letter patterns that are used to represent all of the add sounds in the text the next activity is a variation on an activity that I'm sure you're familiar with it's a word map however instead of putting a word in the middle of the word map you're going to either put a combination of letters or a sound so let's take a look at the first example first variation so you've got this word map you put a circle and then in the middle you're going to put gh T and then students have to write or make a word map and indicate all of the words that have ght in them around this word map an alternative is you put a sound in the middle and then students have to write all of the words they can think of that represent or that have that sound in them so we might put the sound out in the middle and then around the outside of our word map students have to put in all the words they can think of that have the word sorry I have the sound app in them so two variations on a word map the next activity is something that students can do individually we all know that when students are learning new vocabulary we recommend that they keep a vocabulary but an alternative or in addition to that used to have students keep a spelling book and so what they do with all of the the letter combinations or the sounds that they learn they create a page with all of the words that have either those letter combinations or that particular sound so using the same examples our students could have a ght page in their spelling book and so every word that they find that has ght in goes on that page or students can have an app page and every word that they find it has the a sound in it goes on that page and then they can start to see the letter combinations that represent represent the sound ah so this is a self-study tool that students can do individually and they can just keep adding to it as the course progresses activity 6 is also not a new activity in fact it's probably a very old activity and this is a spelling dictation but you can do a twist on the spelling dictation to focus students on on different letter combinations and patterns so you can have a whole list of words that focus on a specific letter combination so you can for example have a ght spelling dictation activity and you dictate the words so say the words twice and then use the word in a sentence and students write down the word and hopefully correctly spell it and all of the words you say for example would be ght words you can take the opposite approach and you can focus on a sound so you can have for example an ass spelling dictation so all of the words that you use in the dictation have the app sound in them and students then have to correctly spell these words and correctly come up with the letter combinations that represent the a sound the next activity activity 7 is another classic activity this is a class spelling bee so just to refresh your memory in case it's been a while students come up to the front and they all line up and then one at a time you give students a word to spell and you say the word twice and use it in a sentence and then students have to verbally spell it and if they spell the word incorrectly they sit down if they spell it correctly they get to stay standing up and you just keep doing this and keep going around and around the students until you have one winner the twist on this is your spelling bee focuses on either one specific letter combination or one specific sound once again so you can have a ght spelling bee or you can have an app sound spelling beep hello so that's a twist on an old classic activity activity aid is also another activity that's not new but it's very useful for getting students to realize or start to understand these sound and letter patterns and this is - this activity simply involves students writing a rhyming poem and it can be any format of rhyming poem so you can pull a poem off the Internet or come up with one for one of your text books but it's simply a poem that has a very clear rhyming pattern and then students have to rate their own poem following the same rhyming pattern and then they'll start to notice ok I have multiple spelling options for these sounds in order to get my rhyming pattern to work so any type of rhyming poem writing he's a great way to get students to focus on letter patterns and sound letter patterns the last activity activity 9 is one that you might want to use with kind of intermediate and higher students this is an activity that gets students digging more deeply into the word building process and this is understanding morphemes so if you recall morphemes represent the smallest unit of meaning in a word so we can take any word and we can divide it up into units of meaning morphemes okay and each unit of meaning is spelled in a particular way so students can start to see patterns above and beyond letter patterns and sound letter patterns they can start to see meaning patterns now this also helps them learn to spell so for example you can teach students the meaning of the morpheme re which means again or on which means not and then they can work with all of the words that have re in them or all of the words that have on now you can then teach them the rules of combining morphemes so you can teach them the rules of affixes and suffixes these are the morphemes that go before a base word and these are the morphemes that go after a base word so with your intermediate and higher classes get students to dig into the morpheme level of words so they can understand these small units of sounds sound how those units are spelled and then how to put those together to create words these activities are all very easy to implement and very easy to plan what they all have in common is they allow you as the teacher to take a very strategic approach to teaching your students spelling and it's an approach that taps into the letter patterns and the sound letter patterns of English spelling with this understanding of the patterns students can start to make some sense of the English spelling system and it doesn't just look like a big chaotic mess to them now they can start to figure out okay there's patterns here and if I learn these patterns then I can master English spelling these activities come from two resources that I highly recommend you take a look at if you're interested in getting more background on the activities and also learning more activities so these two resources are listed on your handout so if you get the chance take a look at them here's a quick recap of what we covered in this session we started with a discussion about why it's actually important for our English language students to learn how to spell accurately and efficiently we then looked at the concept of spelling we looked at the different processes that are involved in actually spelling a word and taking the sound and representing it visually then we took a look at the challenges presented by English spelling because of its opaque orthography so we discussed the terminology and then we looked at the different challenges that we have when it comes to finding the patterns in English spelling we also looked at the different historical influences that created the English spelling that we have today and finally we looked at different activities that allow us to strategically and systematically focus our students on the patterns of English spelling so that they can master how to spell correctly and efficiently hopefully you have some good activity ideas and some good background information to help your students be good spellers [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Advance Consulting for Education

Views: 646

Rating: 4.4666667 out of 5

Keywords: Advance Consulting for Education, ACE, Teaching English, English as a Second Language, Teaching ESL, ESL, EFL, TEFL, TESL, TESOL, Teaching Tips, Teaching Techniques, Teaching Strategies, Teacher Professional Development, Teacher PD, Professional Development, The PD Exchange, The Professional Development Exchange, www.thepdexchange.ca, www.aceducation.ca, Dianne Tyers, English spelling, spelling

Id: YUu3yGkMN20

Length: 73min 51sec (4431 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 02 2019