Spelfabet

Phonics With Feeling Set 10 now available

I’ve just put six brand new Set 10 Phonics With Feeling printable decodable readers into the Spelfabet website shop. Like all these books, they cost 40c per print to make 5 copies, or 20c per print to make 30 copies. You provide the paper/card, printer and assembly time, which of course adds to the real cost, but if you’re short of funds, these are a very affordable way to boost your library of decodable text.

What sounds did you SAY (not just hear) in that word?

If you haven’t listened to the US Reading League’s podcast with Dr Jeannine Herron, or watched it on YouTube, I highly recommend it. She’s an inspiration, the perfect tonic if you’re feeling a bit wearied by swimming-through-COVID-mud, as I am.

At 84, she has a wonderful laugh, rogue chickens, and is planning to write a new program, not resting on her life’s laurels as a teacher, activist, research scientist, adventurer, writer, editor, and a program and software developer.

New printable decodable books, including an extra free one

To celebrate the removal of predictable texts and multicueing from the Australian National Curriculum (yippee!), more Phonics with Feeling printable decodable books are now available from the Spelfabet website.

These provide an affordable way to help Year 1 and 2 students, advanced Foundation students, and slightly older strugglers to build decoding skills. They are longer than most decodable books, allowing for cohesive narratives, entertaining plots, engaging characters, and themes worth talking about.

New 2 ways to spell vowels cards, including a free deck

Some students need smaller-than-average steps and extra practice to get spelling patterns into long-term memory. Games are a great, nag-free way to get in lots of targeted, extra repetitions.

The newest set of download-and-print Spelfabet phonics playing cards has 14 decks, each with one vowel sound spelt two ways, and includes a free sample deck:

New morpheme-based spelling lists

I’ve just added some morpheme-based word lists to the Spelfabet spelling lists.

Morphemes are meaningful word parts, and are listed in the following order: inflectional suffixes (part of grammar), prefixes, derivational suffixes, and bound bases from Germanic, Latin and Greek.

These lists have been harder to make than I’d expected, but also more interesting, because so many morphemes, er, morph.

For example, the ‘fact’ in factory has the same origin as the ‘fect’ in ‘confectionery’ and the ‘fic’ in ‘artificial’ and ‘fiction’. They’re all to do with making stuff, of course. I’ve therefore put them all on the same list, which starts like this:

Sometimes it’s hard to know how to classify morphemes, especially Greek ones. The Greek base ‘logue/log’, as in ‘catalogue’ and ‘analogous’, has the same origin as the -ology suffix in ‘biology’, ‘mythology’ and ‘psychology’, so I tried hard to keep them together, but in the end settled on two linked entries, here’s the bound base one:

If you’re using teaching resources like Word Sums or the Base Bank , you might notice that sometimes my lists have a single entry for a morphing morpheme (e.g. ‘vene’, ‘ven’ or ‘vent’ meaning ‘come’), whereas their resources have two entries. I don’t think this matters, and hope that those resources and my lists are complementary, since it’s easier to work with just one version of a morpheme (what linguists call an allomorph), but it can be interesting and useful to link other versions.

It will probably take a while for Google’s bots to crawl all over the new lists and make it possible to search for e.g. ‘spelfabet base logue’ and get the relevant list straight away. However, it’s been possible to Google e.g. ‘spelfabet igh as in night’ for years, so I’m hoping that soon the bots will do their work, and make it easy for teachers and others to find the morpheme-based spelling lists.

I’ll keep adding more morphing morphemes to the site as time permits, but wanted the lists made available before this week’s DSF Language, Literacy and Learning Virtual Conference, as I talk about morphology quite a bit in my session. Hope you’re looking forward to this conference as much as I am, and that you find my morpheme-based lists useful.

Context can reduce accurate word learning

I’ve been reading an interesting 2017 dissertation by US researcher Reem Al Ghanem in preparation for this month’s DSF conference. It’s about how children learn to read and write polysyllabic words.

One section jumped out at me, because multi-cueing and the idea that phonics/word study should occur in context is still popular in many Australian schools:

“When poor readers rely on context to aid word recognition, they focus on selecting semantically appropriate words given the context clues rather than decoding the words through letter-sound conversion strategy.

“When children utilize a compensatory strategy like contextual guessing rather than phonological decoding to aid their word recognition, their attention to word form is limited, resulting in poorer acquisition of word-specific representations, hence the negative context effects.

“When poor readers are presented with words in isolation, they are forced to read them using phonological decoding. Although inefficient, their phonological decoding of the words increases their attention to the orthographic details of the words, resulting in acquiring higher quality representations for the words than when they are presented in
context.” (p103)

Developing high-quality word representations is a challenging activity for struggling readers. Expecting them to only learn words in context is a bit like asking them to only learn to shoot netball or basketball goals during a real game, and discouraging goal-shooting and other skills practice.

As a weedy, unco, asthmatic kid keen to avoid on-court humiliation, I voluntarily did many hours of goal-shooting practice. Imagine if coaches discouraged such practice, and said sporting skills should only be learnt in the context of real games. We’d all stare at them. Then ignore them.

Al Ghanem’s dissertation goes on:

“While context clues can support comprehension, they are unreliable sources for orthographic learning. Teachers must select the instructional strategy that fits the goal of instruction, and presenting words in isolation appears to be the most beneficial when the goal of instruction is acquiring word-specific representations.” (p107)

Why do we say the past tense suffix -ed three ways?

Young children learning to sound out words often write ‘jumped’ as ‘jumpt’ or ‘jumt’. They write the verb ‘filmed’ as ‘filmd’ and ‘landed’ as ‘landud’ or ‘landid’, depending on their accent.

They’re writing what they say/hear, which is great, but English has a special spelling for the regular past tense suffix: -ed. This spelling shows readers that, for example, the intended meaning is ‘packed’ (the bag) not ‘pact’ (between two countries).

But why do we pronounce this suffix three different ways? Why do we also have three pronunciations for regular plural and third person present inflectional suffixes, as in ‘kicks‘ (sounds like /s/), bends‘ (sounds like ‘z’) and ‘wishes‘? (sounds like /es/ or /uz/, depending on your accent). And what’s an inflectional suffix, anyway?

Here’s my third Fun Spelling Facts for Grownups video, in which I try to relate the visible part of our writing system (orthography) to the sounds (phonology) and meanings (morphology) in our spoken language. It’s 7.5 minutes long (yes, I talk too much), but the past tense -ed part is first. Hope it’s useful.