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Society for the Scientific Study of Reading conference: Day 1

My head nearly exploded with new learning at the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading Conference in Port Douglas last week. I wasn’t tempted to wag any sessions by beach, pool, sunshine or opportunities to chat, and often wished I could clone myself and go to two or three concurrent sessions.

I’ll try to summarise the most interesting bits, without getting too TL,DR. Any mistakes/misunderstandings in what follows are my fault, let me know if you spot one. I’ll write about one day at a time, or my brain really will explode.

Learning to read syllables

Danish Professor Carsten Elbro (co-author of Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension) described research in which adults learnt novel symbols for three phonemes (/m/, /s/ and /ar/, the latter not occurring in Danish). Surprisingly, dyslexic adults couldn’t blend two of these sounds into syllables, though they could say the syllables. Blending is very hard for some people. Perhaps this relates to the way sounds change when they blur together in words (coarticulation).

In Italy, fairly straightforward sound-letter relationships and relatively few possible syllables allow kids to be taught sound-letter relationships, after which most can figure out blending on their own. However, languages like English and Danish have complex relationships between sounds and letters, and greater complexity and number of possible syllables. Prof Elbro studied 200 Danish and Italian children in Grades 1 and 2, and found that learning to read new syllables was something that had a protracted influence on decoding development, especially in Danish. This may present lasting obstacles for learners in blending and retaining (via orthographic mapping) the pronunciations and spellings of syllables, so they can be read instantly in words.

Prof Elbro’s research found that showing kids how to blend by moving letter cards together was a waste of time. The kids who didn’t have this ‘blending support’ did equally well.

Orthographic skeletons

Readers who hear short, novel words create ‘orthographic skeletons‘ for them by thinking about how they’re probably spelt. Esra Ataman of Macquarie University’s Masters thesis research taught 81 adults made-up, spoken (but not written) words with suffixes like ‘vished’, ‘visher’, ‘jafed’ and ‘jafer’. These “inventions of Professor Parsnip” were used in sentences e.g. a ‘visher’ is a toaster-like machine used for shuffling cards. The adults were then asked to read the made-up base words e.g. ‘vish’ (expected spelling) and ‘jayf’ (weird spelling, you’d expect ‘jafe’ or ‘jaif’) and their reaction times were recorded. Weird spellings were read more slowly, suggesting the adults had formed orthographic skeletons for the made-up base words, even though they’d never heard them without suffixes. Whether the trained words had inflectional or derivational suffixes didn’t seem to make much difference.

Morphology meta-analysis

Dr Danielle Colenbrander from the recently-established Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy at ACU reported on a meta-analysis of research about teaching children how words are made up of meaningful word parts (morphology). Findings suggested morphology instruction helps kids with word-level reading and spelling, and transfers to the spelling of new words, but doesn’t affect comprehension. Only four of the 27 mostly US/UK studies included in this research studied beginning readers (K-2) so we don’t really know how early to start. Explicit teaching and longer-term intervention seemed to be better than implicit or short-term teaching, but there was great diversity and many gaps in the research, making it hard to know what kind of teaching is most effective, who benefits the most, or draw other conclusions.

Morphemes as islands of regularity

Dr Elisabetta Simone from Macquarie University compared how suffixes work in English and Italian. English has less complicated morphology than Italian, but much more complicated sound-spelling relationships. Her research added suffixes to real and nonsense words, and measured how quickly samples of 60 speakers of each language decided whether they were real words or not. The results suggested that English speakers relied more on morphological processing than the Italian speakers. Perhaps in the crazy chaos of the English writing system, standard spellings of morphemes provide helpful islands of regularity.

A hangover is not an overhang

Jasmine Spencer from Macquarie University spoke about the position of morphemes in written words. Free morphemes (words in their own right) can occupy different positions in longer words: ‘book’ is at the start of ‘bookshelf’ but the end of ‘textbook’. Even when compound words are scrambled e.g. ‘proofweather’ and ‘childrengrand’, they still look like real words. However, prefixes and suffixes are position-dependent. When they’re out of order – ‘ismtru’ or ‘ismsch’ – they look like gibberish. The 90 adults in her research took longer to reject scrambled compound words when their meanings were suggested by the component words (e.g. dreamday) than when they were not (e.g. linedead), and quicker to reject scrambled non-compounds (e.g. shadeday), so semantics plays a role in processing these written words. Subjects also rejected nonwords more slowly when they had real suffixes.

The Word and Affix Model

Dr Lisi Beyersmann from Macquarie University talked about a new model showing word parts being processed separately during reading. This is based on research showing typical readers read complex non-words containing real morphemes more easily than similar looking non-words. Research involving five adults with acquired dyslexia also showed they benefited from the presence of identifiable morphemes when reading nonwords. Even though prefixes come first in words, stems facilitated non-word reading more. This might be because stems tend to have clearer meanings, whereas affixes tend to be more abstract.

Tween/teen processing of morphemes

Leah Zimmermann from the University of Iowa spoke about research examining automatic processing of morphemes in 80 monolingual 12-14 year olds of varying reading ability. Students’ reading accuracy and automaticity (words presented for 90 milliseconds) were both tested on a set of 320 words. Half the words had only one morpheme, and half had two morphemes (stem and derivational suffix). Automaticity was important for fluency and comprehension, but the role of morphological processing was less clear. My notes say that the only variable to contribute unique variance to comprehension was the ability to read syllables, but I can’t find that in the abstract, so I hope it’s correct.

Spelling irregular words

Most English word spellings follow sound (phonological) or word part (morphological) logic, but some don’t. There’s growing interest in how to teach these, for example using ‘spelling pronunciations’ or repeated practice. A/Prof Saskia Kohnen from Macquarie Uni talked about a study of 14 children aged 8-11 who were poor spellers (5th percentile on the Test of Written Spelling) but had other skills in the average range. They did pre-tests, then two and six weeks later wrote out 182 irregular words from the Oxford Word List, to gather two baselines. There wasn’t much natural spelling improvement in between. They then did four weeks of training (direct copying, delayed copying, spelling to dictation) at home on 32 of the words, then did a post-test.

All 14 kids made significant gains on trained words. Eight also significantly improved on untrained words. Words containing only minor errors were more likely to improve, along with words high in frequency and neighbourhood size (with similar sounds/spellings). Improved spelling of untrained words might mean kids were using a different strategy, or improving their ability to represent words in long-term memory.

Lexical richness: the vocabulary of books

The language of books is quite different from the language we use in everyday conversation. Books tend to use more sophisticated words, and unique word types. Reading aloud to children gives them early exposure to this language, or access to greater ‘lexical richness’. Nicola Dawson and colleagues from Oxford University read 180 children aged 4-7 three versions of specially-written stories. One version used a basic vocabulary item (e.g. ‘hungry’) several times, another used several synonyms (e.g. ‘hungry’, ‘starving’, ‘peckish’, ‘famished’), and a third version used the most sophisticated word (e.g. ‘famished’) repeatedly. Children were asked to retell the stories to see which words they used. Children who heard the sophisticated words repeatedly were more likely to use them. Diversity was less important. There was a clear benefit from re-reading the stories. They are still collecting data on retention/use of synonyms.

Executive Functions training

Working memory, attention, cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control – known collectively as Executive Functions – affect all learning. Shani Levy-Shimon from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University studied 72 Hebrew-speaking third grade poor readers, who worked in small groups of 3-4 students, for 35 minutes, three times a week for 16 weeks. 6 teachers each taught 2-3 groups, using either a multicomponent literacy intervention or business as usual. Some of the multicomponent intervention included Executive Functions training. The children receiving the Executive Functions training outperformed the other groups on all measures.

Psychosocial wellbeing

There were quite a few talks about the psychosocial impacts of literacy skill development/failure, but I’d decided to focus on word-level reading and spelling, so missed most of them. However, I did plan to attend a talk by NZ Prof John Everatt about research following two samples of struggling readers in Years 4-6. One group of 57 students received morphology intervention from Speech-Language Pathologists, while a second group of 30 received this intervention from their classroom teacher. Both groups improved not only their vocabulary, morphological awareness, word reading, spelling and reading comprehension, but also their academic self-concept and self-efficacy.

With five talks per session, and no time in between, I was often running between rooms like a madwoman, so must have missed the start of this one, when (I think) A/Prof Alison Arrow of Canterbury Uni, a co-author of the original abstract, explained John couldn’t come, and she’d talk about her PhD research instead. She had studied three groups of about 20 middle school students, who were given morphological intervention – 30 minutes 4 times per week for 10 weeks (40 sessions), or 20-30 minutes across 20 weeks (40 sessions). Their literacy skills improved, with some improvements on psychosocial measures as well.

She also said difficulties in psychosocial development due to literacy difficulties can emerge within the first six weeks of schooling, or even earlier, and can be pervasive and compound as students progress through school. Kids with learning difficulties often blame themselves for failure, but attribute success to external factors. There’s some evidence psychosocial development is very stable, so giving these kids reading success is perhaps the best way to meet their psychosocial needs.

Brain scans and diagnostic terms

Kelly Mahaffy from the University of Connecticut talked about brain scans comparing typical readers and poor decoders with ‘poor comprehenders’. She said the latter group make up about 10% of the population, and have reduced vocabulary, and difficulties with semantic and syntactic processing, inference and comprehension monitoring. In a large sample from the Child Mind Institute Healthy Brain Network Biobank, there were some frontal lobe grey matter differences, but no significant difference in white matter. This suggests executive functions are important in reading comprehension.

After the session I asked her why she didn’t use the internationally-agreed term Developmental Language Disorder instead ‘Poor Comprehenders’. She said there are people who are good at both decoding and language comprehension, but poor at reading comprehension. I raised an eyebrow and said I’d never met one, and she said she’d send me more information. I’ll let you know if it’s interesting.

Poster displays

After lunch each day there were lots of poster displays. I won’t try to summarise them, or the interesting discussions they provoked, but here’s what they looked like:

Overhaul of Initial Teacher Education

I’ve been doing little happy dances about the announcement in the video below, and am celebrating with a two-week 20%-off-everything sale in the Spelfabet shop (use the coupon code HappyDance at the checkout):

An expert panel review has found that Australia’s universities aren’t preparing teachers to teach reading and writing well. Our Education Ministers say they must do better at this, and other areas like maths and classroom management, without delay. Teacher knowledge is the key to student success.

A lot of good work from many good people has achieved this, but there’s nothing so inspiring or persuasive as a good example. Schools in the Canberra-Goulburn diocese have retrained their teachers in the science of learning, and reduced NAPLAN reading underperformance from 42% to just 4%, with similar gains in writing and spelling. Read more about this here, and make sure your school leadership knows about their Catalyst program.

Researchers have known for a long time that this kind of success is possible, but it’s less well understood in schools and the wider community, and there are still barriers to its achievement needing dismantling. Education academics and others have already pushed back on the conclusions of the teacher education review, arguing that things like inequitable school funding and teacher workloads, wages, and status are the real problem.

I think it’s shocking that most government schools (which educate the most needy students) get less funding than they’re entitled to under the School Resource Standard, while private schools get more. This should be corrected, pronto, but it’s not an argument against improving teacher preparation. We need both funding fairness and excellent teacher preparation.

Teachers have to work harder when their classes include many kids who can’t read or write very well. Work must be differentiated. Too many kids who understandably hide their learning difficulties behind challenging behaviour must be prevented from distracting the whole class, and supervised in detention. This is not fair to either kids or teachers. It’s preventable.

Giving graduate teachers the skills to get most kids reading and writing well enough to participate and succeed in class should reduce teacher workloads. Success at important work tends to lead to job satisfaction, respect from others, and a sound argument for higher wages. None of the arguments I’ve heard against the ITE overhaul so far stack up.

I’m excited and happy-dancing for two other reasons:

Society for the Scientific Study of Reading conference

The international Society for the Scientific Study of Reading conference will be held in Australia (Port Douglas, ehem) later this month, and I’m going. Stay tuned for a blog post or three about it.

So many amazing people will contribute to the 22-page program, it’s hard to know which sessions to attend, or who to ask for a selfie, or what to focus on for the blog. If you’re coming too, please can we share notes?

Display of decodable books

After collecting decodable books and setting up ad hoc displays for years, we’ve finally set up a Proper Display of a range of decodables in our North Fitzroy office. Looking at things to buy online is just not the same as being able to pick them up and handle them yourself. We’re hoping our display will help local early years teachers successfully make the case, and obtain the funds, to replace their classroom’s predictable/repetitive texts with high-quality decodables.

My colleagues Elle Holloway and Georgina Ryan have been examining the books in detail, and writing summaries to help teachers evaluate the different options. Stay tuned for a blog post about how to book an appointment to browse the display, which currently looks like this:

Chances are your child’s school uses programs which lack strong evidence to support teaching: what parents should know

An article appeared in The Conversation last week called “Chances are your child’s school uses commercial programs to support teaching: what parents should know“.

At first I did a double-take. Parents should be aware, and very concerned, about the variable quality of literacy-teaching programs and approaches used in Australian schools. Many parents now know this, thanks to activism by parent, teacher and other professional groups, plus US journalist Emily Hanford’s brilliant reporting on what’s known generally as Balanced Literacy, and specifically programs by Marie Clay, Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell and Lucy Caulkins.

Fountas and Pinnell’s Benchmark Assessment System and Classroom and Leveled Literacy Intervention programs, Caulkins’s Units of Study programs (all sold in Australia by Pearson), and other Balanced Literacy approaches (e.g. three-cueing, Running Records, Guided Reading, rote-memorisation of high-frequency wordlists), are widely used in Australia. A few Australian schools might still use Clay’s Reading Recovery program, despite recent research showing its long-term impact, and petitions like this one from my local Dyslexia Victoria Support (please sign if you’re in Victoria). Caulkins has now seen the scientific writing on the wall, and added systematic phonics to her early years program, but I’m not rushing out to buy it.

However, The Conversation’s authors last week, three Education academics from Edith Cowan University in WA, were not objecting to poor quality programs. They were objecting to commercial programs.

Are they just anti-commerce?

Are the authors anti-commerce in general? Do they grow their own food and make their own clothes, avoiding the stench of filthy lucre? Maybe they think all educational programs should be free. This would make writing programs the province of overworked teachers and the independently wealthy. Is earning a living writing educational programs wrong? Aren’t teachers entitled to the best available tools?

The article’s stated concern is that “the content and the way students are being taught is outsourced to a third-party provider, who is not your child’s teacher.” Interesting use of the passive tense. Outsourced by whom? Are they seriously suggesting that teachers should make, not buy, all programs? What about programs consistent with the best available scientific evidence, and extensively classroom-tested? Do they seriously think it’s OK for the nation’s children to be here’s-a-program-I-made-earlier guinea pigs?

Well, no. They write:

“It is easy to see why schools use commercial programs. They offer efficient, consistent delivery of content across year levels. They also save teachers planning time and come with ready-made resources for lessons.

But schools often adopt these programs to reduce workload or because they have become widely accepted by other schools, rather than investigating whether they are endorsed and peer-reviewed by Australian or international education experts.“

The evidence pyramid

I did another double-take. Programs “endorsed and peer-reviewed by experts” are the best schools can do?? But expert opinion is right at the bottom of the evidence pyramid. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but experts get stuff wrong all the time. We’re talking about the nation’s kiddies here. I respectfully submit that schools should focus on evidence from (ideally) the top of the evidence pyramid, much of which is readily accessible in plain-English explanations like this one from the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation. We should all simply ignore experts when they disagree with the best available scientific evidence.

I’m sorry, but what exactly is being argued?

The Edith Cowan academics’ article goes on to argue against (strongly evidence-based) direct instruction because of “broad understanding” that play-based experiences are better. What exactly is “broad understanding”? Once upon a time, we had a broad understanding that the earth was flat.

It says using a commercial program limits a teacher’s ability to meet individual needs. I would have thought that not staying up all night writing programs, or having to think through every aspect of their delivery, would help rather than hinder a teacher’s ability to differentiate.

And then the old chestnut: commercial programs are “taking autonomy away from teachers, while devaluing their professional knowledge and skills”. Is teacher autonomy really a core value for parents? Do the authors realise that highly-valued, knowledgeable and skilled professionals like surgeons and engineers can’t just do what they like? They must keep their checklists and procedures strictly aligned with current research and best practice, lest they be sued for malpractice or build something that falls down and kills people. Yet they’re still highly valued.

The article says teachers receive evidence-based training at university. The 2021 report of the Quality Teacher Education Review disagreed, and recommended universities improve (among other things) what they teach about reading, including phonemic awareness and phonics as essential in the early years.

Like most unconvincing articles, this one wraps up with a grab bag of unsubstantiated claims: commercial programs are generic, repetitive, irrelevant, and make it hard for kids to learn “at their natural pace” (does this mean “let the slower kids go slow?” Surely that’s a recipe for letting them fall further behind?). They could harm engagement and social and emotional development. Hmm. Links provided are to very general articles about good practice, but no research highlighting the evils of commercial programs in schools.

Hooray for all the teachers who know better, and are doing better

The teachers I talk to are hungry for information about evidence-based practice, and determined to be accountable to their students and the wider community. They’re joining groups like Reading Science in Schools in droves, and booking out Sharing Best Practice and ResearchEd events. They’re critically evaluating the programs available in their schools, dumping poor-quality ones, and replacing them with better quality programs. Some of these are free, and some are bought with money (AKA commercial).

These teachers are amazing, parents should know about them, and we should all be cheering them on.

Does this child need formal assessment?

It’s the last week of term here in wintry Melbourne, and many parents will be getting school reports saying their child has some reading and/or spelling difficulties, and suggesting further assessment.

Others will be worrying about their child’s skills, but being advised to wait and see if they catch up. Children often don’t catch up, and waiting for them to do so can waste valuable early intervention time.

A full developmental and educational assessment needs to be done by a psychologist, but can be quite expensive, and there are usually long waiting lists. If you think your child might have dyslexia/dysgraphia, please make sure your child does at least six months of high-quality intervention before seeking a diagnostic assessment, as that’s one of the diagnostic criteria for Specific Learning Disorder.

Speech pathologists can assess speech-language related aspects of reading and spelling, and provide recommendations, but again there’s usually a wait (though we have a few appointments available in North Fitzroy in the holidays, contact us here to find out more). Special educators can also assist with many assessments, but again those in the private sector often have long waiting lists, and if they’re school-based, they’re probably about to go on holidays.

If booking an assessment, make sure you find out how long it will take, what it will cover/include and how much it will cost beforehand. You don’t want to spend $1000+ on a 50-page report you don’t really understand, containing so many recommendations that you don’t know where to start.

AUSPELD online screener and parent website

The AUSPELD website has a useful Next Steps Screening Tool designed to help parents work out whether to seek formal assessment and/or intervention for their child.

AUSPELD’s Understanding Learning Difficulties for Parents website also contains great information to help parents understand children’s learning difficulties, and think about what to do and who can help.

Words read accurately in a minute

The number of words a child can read accurately in a minute is a useful litmus test of whether a child may have a reading problem requiring further investigation. In very general terms (see detailed norms here), by the end of Grade 1 (second year of schooling), children should be able to read an age-level text at something like 50-60 words per minute, or one word per second. This should increase to about 80-100 words per minute by the end of Grade 2, and about 110-120 words per minute by the end of Grade 3.

By the end of primary school children should be able to read at around 150 words per minute. This is about a normal conversational speech rate, though of course auctioneers and people in paid political advertisements speak much faster. Our brains like to process language at about conversational speed, and find it harder to comprehend if it’s a lot slower. Try slowing a podcast down to 75% to experience this. It makes me want to throw my phone across the room.

Highly skilled readers can read much faster than people usually speak, up to 240-300 words per minute, though it depends on what they’re reading. A trashy novel is easier than a complex scientific article.

Don’t wait-to-fail

If your child seems to have a problem with reading and/or spelling, please don’t wait to see if they grow out of it. They might not, and reading and spelling are essential skills for school and life success.

What do kids’ names teach them about spelling?

The first word a child often learns to read and write is their own name. What first impression of our writing system does this give little Charlie, Chloe and Charlotte?

Our current crop of 5-year-olds was born in 2018, so I googled most popular baby names 2018 and looked for names that wouldn’t surprise a child with complete faith in ‘sounds of letters’, alphabet song type phonics.

I found only one name: Max. Even that would surprise kids whose poster/song says letter ‘X’ represents /eks/ as in ‘x-ray’. Add Quinn if you know a doubled consonant is usually pronounced the same as a single one, and your poster/song doesn’t say letter ‘Q’ by itself represents /kw/.

However, most kids’ names have more than one syllable, and contain at least one unstressed vowel. Let’s assume kids aren’t phased by vowel reduction or doubled consonants. Now we can sound out Emma, Ella, Camilla, Madison, Elena, Addison, Bella, Stella, Anna, Allison, Benjamin, Cameron, Adam, Landon, Colton, Ezra, Hudson, Dominic, Jameson, Evan, Declan, and Weston. A total of 24 names out of 200.

Hmm. Let’s add names containing ‘long’ vowel sounds represented by one letter (‘a’ in apron, ‘e’ in even, ‘i’ in icy, ‘o’ in open, ‘u’ in unit). IMHO the best thing about letter names is that the vowel names are also relevant sounds (but kids who extrapolate this to consonant letters tend to write ‘spl’ for ‘spell’, ‘pn’ for ‘pen’ and ‘cr’ for ‘car’). A child able to manipulate vowel sounds in words can now sound out Ava, Zoe, Maya, Penelope, Lila, Nova, Hazel, Violet, Eva, Mason, Logan, Jacob, Leo, Caleb, Owen, David, Samuel, Eli, Nolan, Roman, Rowan, and Jason.

This brings us up to 46 of 200 names, or 50 if we count names with ‘long’ vowel sounds written with ‘split’/VCe/silent final e spellings: James, Zane, Miles, Grace, (though she has a funny /s/ spelling), and Luke (though his vowel sound is really /oo/, not /ue/ as in ‘tune’).

Three-quarters of this sample of kids’ names still contain unexplained spellings. I don’t understand why being able to spell one’s own name is considered such an important milestone for tinies. Spelling names can be very hard, though Vaughan, Traigh, Clodagh, Siobhan, Niamh and Leigh weren’t hot in 2018.

Kids can make more sense of unexpected spellings in their names (and other words) if they know:

• There are more speech sounds than letters, so we write many with letter combinations.
• Some spellings represent more than one sound.

Our Embedded Picture Mnemonic desk mats are one simple tool which can help teach these concepts. They have the alphabet on one side, and the other speech sounds on the flip side, for example:

They also show shared spellings, as at the start of Asher and Ava, Evelyn and Ethan, Isabella and Isaac, Olivia and Owen, the ‘u’ in Hunter and Samuel and the ‘oo’ in Brooklyn and Cooper:

Confusion over harder sound-spelling relationships in names can be assuaged by teaching kids that most sounds are spelt a few ways, for example:

• The sound /ee/ is written ‘i’ in Sophia, Olivia, Aria, Amelia, Mia, Mila (depending on pronunciation), Aaliyah, Eliana, Arianna, Victoria, Emilia, Liliana, Lillian, Gabriella, Maria, Gianna, Naomi, Juliana, Vivian, Julia, Ezekiel, Damian, Xavier, Adrian, Gabriel, Sebastian, and Liam.

• /ee/ is written ‘ey’ at the end of Riley, Aubrey, Kinsley, Hailey, Paisley, and Audrey.

• /i/ is written ‘y’ in Dylan, and is unstressed in Adalyn, Evelyn, Madelyn, Brooklyn, and Jocelyn.

• /ie/ is written ‘y’ in Ryan, Wyatt, Skyler, Bryson, and Kylie.

• /k/ is written ‘ch’ in Chloe, Michael, Nicholas, Christian (from Greek).
• /f/ is written ph in Sophie, Sophia, Joseph and Christopher (also from Greek).
• /z/ is written ‘X’ in Xavier, Xander and Xena, though sadly the Warrior Princess’s name wasn’t trending in 2018 (again, Greek!).

During a recent conversation about where words come from, a tween with an unusually-spelt name told me she’d always wondered about the spelling of her name.

Please don’t leave the kids in your life wondering.

Tier 2 word structure

When teaching kids to read and spell polysyllable words, I’ve been trying to work with high-utility academic words, AKA Tier 2 Words. My main goal is to ensure learners can read and spell long words. All else being equal, they might as well practise this skill with words they can use across the curriculum.

Usually, I can’t realistically use the gold standard process outlined in the classic vocabulary selection text Bringing Words To Life for this. I only see clients once a week or fortnight, tweens and teens with learning difficulties tend not to communicate much about school topics, and their parents don’t always know what they are. Even when I do find out a school topic, prepare relevant work, and it’s time for their session, their class has often moved on.

So I tried a more generic approach: choosing words from the free grade-level Tier 2 wordlists on the Think SRSD website (thanks to its compilers, Karen Harris and colleagues at Hyde Park Central School District, and to the Think SRSD folk). However, these lists don’t sort words by number of syllables, and many words appear on more than one list. Often they are multi-morpheme words, like “endangered” (en+danger+ed), but useful base words like “danger” aren’t included, and nor are other useful derivations like “dangerous” or “endangering”.

To make the kind of list I wanted, I’ve combined the Think SRSD Tier 2 lists, deleted duplicates, sorted words alphabetically and by number of syllables, then added missing base words and extra derived forms in italics. My colleague Nicola Anglin and her parents (all excellent word nerds) made corrections and added words. We ended up with a 21-page document. Far too long to put in a blog post, but the top section is above, and you can download the whole thing as a pdf here.

If you find mistakes in the document (there are probably a few), want to suggest improvements or have other feedback, please send them in the comments.

New moveable alphabet and affixes

After many failed attempts and two broken laminators (gah), I’ve finally created a moveable alphabet which has lots of prefixes and suffixes but still leaves space on my whiteboard to write/build words, looks good and handles well (its chunkier tiles stick with a satisfying click, and don’t fall off easily).

The set has 140 single-sided tiles and 56 double-sided tiles, representing:

• 11 consonant spellings used before vowels, like ‘j’, ‘h’, ‘v’, ‘wh’ and ‘kn’ (these are green, like a traffic light’s ‘go’ signal),
• 48 vowel spellings like ‘u’, ‘ai’, ‘ea’, ‘oo’, ‘ur’, ‘igh’ and ‘ough’ (orange, meaning ‘caution’, because vowels are the trickiest part of English spelling).
• 36 consonant spellings used after vowels like ‘ck’, ‘ng’, ‘ff’, ‘ve’, ‘tch’, ‘ce’ and ‘mb’ (red, for stop and blend).
• 23 consonant spellings which are used both before and after vowels, like ‘k’, ‘m’, ‘s’, ‘sh’ and ‘ph’ (yellow).
• 22 prefixes (purple).
• 50 suffixes (blue).

All tiles are now the same size, making them easier to cut up and store/carry in a toolbox, if you’re on the go. There are two or three copies of high-use tiles, so you shouldn’t run out of letters like ‘e’ or ‘n’ when building long words (spares not shown in photos above and below). Having double-sided tiles makes the set more compact, and helps establish the concept that speech sounds/affixes are often written more than one way. The photo below shows the ‘flip’ side (as the vinyl buffs say) of the double-sided tiles.

Early, low-verbiage morphology teaching

As well as using this set to build and change words using graphemes, these tiles help you show children how to add prefixes and suffixes to base words without resorting to complex ‘if-then’, ‘except-if’ type language, which young and language-disordered children find hard to understand.

For example, build the word sun, then add:

• suffix -s, to make suns, as in ‘the lizard suns itself on a rock’ (3rd person verb) or ‘many stars are suns’ (plural).
• suffix -‘s, to make sun’s, as in ‘the sun’s rays are bright today’ (possessive)
• suffix -ed, to make sunned, as in ‘the snake sunned itself on that rock yesterday’ (past tense) or ‘He had sunned himself for years, so his skin was leathery’ (past participle). Kids can be told that ‘suned’ is pronounced rhyming with ‘pruned’, so when a vowel suffix is added, we flip the ‘n’ over to get ‘nn’, which keeps the /u/ sound in ‘sun’.
• suffix -ing, to make sunning, as in ‘sunning yourself feels nice, but don’t get burnt’ (present participle). Again, flip the ‘n’ tile over to get ‘nn’.
• suffix -y, to make sunny, as in ‘It’s a lovely, sunny day’ (again, flip the ‘n’).

Some kids get a real six-words-for-the-price-of-one buzz from this. They want to try other prefixes and suffixes, to see what other words they can make. I’ve had to ask a few of them to stop it and sit down, because we have other work to do.

This set also makes it easy to teach the concept that spellings can stay the same when sounds change during word-building e.g.

• Build the word heave, with vowel sound /ee/ represented by ‘ea’, then add suffix -y to get heavy, with vowel sound /e/ represented by ‘ea’.
• Build the word south and notice that the vowel sound changes, but the spelling stays the same, when we add suffix -ern to make southern.
• Build words like act, music and discuss, and notice how their last sounds change when we add suffix -ion to get action, musician and discussion. Preserving base word spellings helps us know what the new word means.

Each tile has example words showing the different ways the spelling can be pronounced. Usually there are only one or two ways, but some spellings have small groups of unusual words (like grapheme ear: bear, pear, wear, tear, swear and heart).

Some prefixes assimilate to base words, for example ‘in’ meaning ‘not’ changes to ‘im’ when added to words starting with lip sounds, like ‘possible’ and ‘modest’. Example words on prefix tiles illustrate this.

This set doesn’t include the six ‘split vowel’ spellings in previous moveable alphabets: a…e as in ‘make’, e…e as in ‘these’, i…e as in ‘like’, o…e as in ‘hope’, u…e as in ‘cute/flute’ and y…e as in ‘type’. Their unusual shape was a bit distracting and fiddly, and they required different logic, potentially adding cognitive load.

The original sets already had several word-final consonant-e spellings: ce as in voice, ge as in large, le as in bottle, se as in house/please, ve as in give, ze as in breeze. Replacing the ‘split’ spellings with extra consonant-e spellings (be, de, fe, ke, me, ne, pe, re and te) only adds three extra graphemes, follows the same left-to-right logic of the rest of the set, and makes it easier to build common words like ‘come/some’ and ‘done/gone’. These reasons, plus ease of making/handling/storing tiles have motivated the change. Sorry about that, if you prefer ‘split’ spellings, but please listen to Episode 11 of the Sounds-Write podcast. You might also be persuaded.

If you already have a serviceable Spelfabet or other moveable alphabet, you can add the new bits of this one to it, keeping the file on your computer so you can print, assemble and use it in full once your existing set finally bites the dust.

Now I just need to revise my wordlists and sequences to match this version of the alphabet. Please bear with me while I do. If you have any feedback about this version, I’d love you to put it in the comments.