Context can reduce accurate word learning

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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?

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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.

Spelling for grown-ups 2: adding suffixes

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These videos were all meant to be under 5 minutes, but it’s hard to explain the main ways word endings change before adding a suffix without oversimplifying them. It takes time to give both examples and non-examples. So this video is nearly 12 minutes long, sorry. I’m making up for it by not writing much about it, except I hope it’s useful!

Spelling for grown-ups 1: /s/ spelt C and /j/ spelt G

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Hooray for recent media reports of a greater emphasis on phonics in the draft Australian National Curriculum.

I’m not a fan of some of the other proposed changes, but more and better teaching of phonics and word-building should prevent a great deal of reading/writing failure, especially among disadvantaged students.

Unfortunately, adults – including many teachers – tell me that they were never taught much about how our spelling system works. This makes it hard for them to teach it well.

I’ve therefore started making a series of what I hope are helpful 5-minute videos for adults about major spelling patterns. Here’s the first one:

Once teachers understand our spelling system, and aren’t hamstrung by unhelpful curriculum requirements, they’ll drop unhelpful spelling-teaching approaches like rote-memorisation of high frequency wordlists, silently writing the same word in many different colours, and other activities not focussed on linking a word’s sounds, spellings and meanings.

Teachers will be able to systematically, explicitly and authoritatively teach how speech sounds are represented by spellings, and how many long words are built from meaningful parts with special spellings. This will help many more children learn to spell and read successfully.

New decodable books for ‘o as in love’ and ‘a’ as in ‘ball’

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The spellings ‘o’ as in ‘love’ and ‘a’ as in ‘ball’ are in many words young children try to write. ‘One’, ‘love’, ‘some’, ‘once’, ‘all’, and ‘called’ are in the first 100 words on the Oxford Wordlist, ‘brother’, ‘other’, ‘come’, ‘water’, ‘also’, and ‘ball’, are in the 2nd 100, ‘won’ is number 206 and ‘small’ is number 228. *

However, these spelling patterns are often taught quite late in phonics teaching sequences. Many words containing these spellings are in early decodable book ‘tricky words’ lists.

Two new download-and-print Phonics With Feeling books allow children to practise words with these spellings, and notice the patterns in how they’re used: ‘love’, ‘dove’, ‘shove’, ‘glove’, ‘some’, ‘come’, ‘done’, ‘none’, ‘won’, ‘son’, ‘other’, ‘brother’, ‘mother’, ‘honey’, ‘money’ and ‘monkey, and ‘all’, ‘ball’, ‘call’, ‘fall’, ‘hall’, ‘mall’, ‘tall’, ‘wall’, ‘stall’, and ‘small’.

These new books expand the Extended Code Set 1 from three to five books. They otherwise contain only Initial Code spellings, plus the small number of ‘tricky words’ listed at the start of each book for pre-teaching. This means skilled teachers can slot them into phonics teaching sequences without introducing other, more difficult sound-spelling relationships.

The Monkeys’ Wedding

In Zulu, a sunshower is called umshado wezinkawu, meaning ‘monkey’s wedding’, so in some parts of Africa and the Caribbean, people say it’s a monkey’s wedding when the sun appears during rain. The new Phonics With Feeling Extended Code Set 1 book ‘The Monkeys’ Wedding’ is a cute, rhyming story of two monkeys in love whose wedding is almost spoilt by rain:

As well as giving children decoding and vowel-flexing practice, I love that this book offers an opportunity to discuss idioms, and that the idiom it refers to comes from a language and culture many English-speakers know little about.

Author and illustrator Gaia (AKA Teresa) Dovey has excelled herself with this book’s illustrations. The monkeys look fluffy enough to pat, and there are some gleefully naughty-looking little ones.

Up The Wall

The second new Extended Code Set 1 book, ‘Up The Wall’, also presents an opportunity to discuss literal and figurative meanings. It begins with a mother telling her children they’re driving her up the wall playing soccer in the hall, so they decide to go to the mall where there is a climbing wall. One child races to the top of the wall but then freezes, afraid he’ll fall. His mother must literally go up the wall to coax him, red-faced, back down. This series is not called Phonics With Feeling for nothing!

Free quizzes, and free upgrade if you have EC Set 1 already

Quizzes about these and all the other Phonics With Feeling books are available free on Wordwall, or you can download them here. Use them as is, or put some or all questions into Kahoots or other formats to suit your learners. There’s been a slight edit to the first Extended Code Set 1 book, Nancy Visits the City, which is reflected in its updated quiz, and a few other improvements across other books in the series.

Everyone who bought the original Extended Code Set 1 when it had only three books has been sent the new set of five books and updated quizzes via We Transfer. If that includes you, please download the files quickly, before the transfer expires, and let us know if you have difficulty.

Print up to 5 books @ 40c per copy, or up to 30 books @ 20c per copy

All the Phonics With Feeling books are available in either parent/aide sets (print up to 5 copies for 40c per print) or bulk teacher/clinician sets (print up to 30 copies for 20c per print). You provide the paper/card, printer and time printing and assembling them, so please factor these into your ‘is this good value?’ decision-making.

The Phonics With Feeling books aren’t for absolute beginners, as there are already plenty of good decodable books available for them. Some children will be able to read them towards the end of their first year of school, but they’re mostly for children in their second or third year of school, or slightly older catch-up learners.

More information about these books, including how to print and assemble them, can be found in this 2021 blog post. There is also an author interview here, and information about each book’s title, target spelling(s), number of words and plot in its entry in the Spelfabet shop. If you don’t already have the free sample book, it’s here.

* In the first 200 Oxford words containing a one-letter ‘o’ spelling, it is pronounced as in ‘got’ 15 times, as in ‘love’ 8 times, as in ‘so’ 7 times and as in ‘to’ 5 times.

Affordable basic phonics kit

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Thanks to the pandemic, many children seem to have done year or more of disrupted schooling without having learnt to read or spell much. A new batch of Australian five-year-olds start school soon, where many will (happily) be taught the systematic, explicit phonics that’s helpful for all, harmful for none and crucial for some*, but many won’t.

The download-and-print Spelfabet Level 1 kit aims to equip you to help beginners and strugglers of any age learn to read and spell one-syllable words with up to seven sounds. The kit follows this teaching sequence (the same as the Sounds-Write program):

The kit contents are a workbook, quizzes, moveable alphabet, word-building sequences, playing cards, reading journal and phonics picture book. The only difference between the parent/aide kit and the teacher/clinician kit is how many copies of the workbook you may print (5 or 30 copies).

All the items in this kit are available separately from the Spelfabet website, except the simplified Moveable Alphabet, which contains only the spellings needed for Level 1. However, it’s cheaper to get the kit than each item separately ($55 including GST for the parent/aide version and $65 for the teacher/clinician one).

Decodable books for reading practice which follow the same teaching sequence include the Units 1-10 Sounds Write books including free e-books, the Units 1-10 Dandelion and Moon Dogs books from Phonic Books, and the printable Drop In Series Levels 1 and 2.

If this kit is too basic for your learner(s), more difficult kits will be available soon.

* See article by Catherine Snow and Connie Juel (2005) at https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-06969-026

New Phonics With Feeling books and author interview

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Set Three of the download-and-print Phonics With Feeling Extended Code readers are now available from the Spelfabet shop.

These books provide lots of reading practice of words with single-letter ‘long’ vowel sounds, as in ‘apron’, ‘being’, ‘final’, ‘open’ and ‘using’.

Many of these are suffixed forms of the ‘split vowel’/’silent final e’ spellings in Set Two e.g. make-making, Swede-Swedish, iceicy, hope-hoped, cute-cutest. Word lists at the start of each book make this explicit.

The ‘c’ as in ‘ice’ and ‘g’ as in ‘age’ spellings, which often occur with these spellings, are practised in the Extended Code Set One books.

The Set Three books also include the ‘short’ vowel sounds, as in ‘at’, ‘red’, ‘in’, ‘on’ and ‘up’. When tackling new words, children should be encouraged to try both sounds for a vowel letter, if the first sound they try doesn’t produce a word that makes sense. This requires phoneme manipulation skills, and the knowledge that a spelling can represent more than one sound.

Like the other Phonics With Feeling books, the Set Three books have a print-5-copies version (parent/aide) for 40c per print, and a bulk print-30-copies version (teacher/clinician) for 20c per print. Our free quizzes (downloadable or on Wordwall) have been updated to include Set Three.

Teresa Dovey (pen name Gaia Dovey, as that’s what her grandkids call her) is the author of the Phonics With Feeling decodable readers. Here’s a 15-minute interview in which she discusses why she started writing the books, why they’re called Phonics With Feeling, her academic background in English Literature, what the books are like, who they’re for, how they can be used, and some of the feedback she’s received on them.

We hope these books make decodable text interesting and enjoyable for children, and affordable for adults, and that they help kids learn to decode as well as Teresa’s grandkids, so they can go on to enjoy reading whatever they choose.

If you’ve tried the books, please share any comments or feedback you have below.