"What Teachers Should Know About Spelling" article

I am grateful to Megan, an Australian follower of The Spelling Blog, for pointing me to this summary of what seems like a very interesting talk by Dr Misty Adoniou about teaching spelling. Her ideas are similar to mine in many ways but have some really interesting variations. To summarise the summary(!):

• Phonics and visual skills are not the most important indicators of being a good speller
• English is morpho-phonemic (based on meaning as well as sound) and etymology (word origin) plays a large part, so these two aspects should be explicitly taught across the curriculum (if taught in English, of course)
• We need to teach 6 types of knowledge about words to spell them well: meaning, sound, acceptable and typical letter patterns, origins, parts of words and remembering what words look like.
• We should teach spelling strategies through words that learners meet in context  in real books rather than having lists of words to learn that illustrate a strategy.

All sounds very sensible to me. Read the whole article here: http://www.atesolact.org.au/recent-atesol-act-events.html#a1377 - now here: http://www.atesolact.org.au/events/past-atesol-act-events/#Spelling2013 

Thank you, Misty, Megan and Tina Williamson, the summary author. More about Misty Adoniou

Johanna

Aspire, Inspire and Expire - related meanings?

I saw this on my Facebook feed:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/1044294_204622203023918_1799367311_n.jpg

A neat little quote for teachers I thought. Then I couldn't help looking at those three spire words and wondering what they had in common in terms of meaning. So off to some of my favourite etymological websites (www.etymonline.com and wordinfo.info) and here's what I found and worked out. 

The root here is spire meaning breathe or breath life into  from the Latin spirare

• aspire - to breathe life upon something- to have hope
• inspire - to breathe or blow into another - in other words, "influence or animate with an idea or purpose" 
• expire - breathe out, especially for the last time (so meaning die or finish) - spelling note: ex means out of but we can't put that before the whole word spire (exspire) because x is never followed by s except across a compound word such as flaxseed)

And here are some more spire words

• conspire - literally breathe together, but means to plot something together
• perspire - to breathe through. The sweat meaning came later but I suppose is about a kind of breathing through the skin.
• respire - this literally means breathe again but I really don't know why it's again. I guess just one breath isn't enough to keep you alive!

The there are all the spirit words that are also related: spirited, spiritual, etc

But, by the way, the word spire itself, meaning a tall pointed tower, comes from a completely different root. It's related to an Old Norse word meaning a slender stalk. 

Love this etymology stuff! Feel free to add your own etymological 'noticings' in the comments.

Johanna

Change y to i ... or change i to y?

Sometimes I find it's useful to turn things upside down. Looking at something in this different way prevents me from just accepting it the way I've always looked at it and makes me consider it more carefully, perhaps noticing things I hadn't seen before.

I like doing this with language 'rules' too. I want to check out for myself whether they are really reliable enough to be useful. I've certainly found some that weren't.

y to i
In English spelling, we often hear, "If a word ends with y, change it to i before adding a suffix". This is generally true but there are, of course, exceptions. If there is a vowel before the y, it doesn't usually change. And there are irregular instances such as say and said.

One of my posts was about letters not found at the end of native English words. It contained a PowerPoint presentation in it called Never-Ending Letters in which I identified i as one of those letters (except of course for the pronoun I). While I was writing it I noticed that it might be a good idea to turn this so-called 'rule' about y changing to i on its head - turn it upside down in other words.


i to y?
What if we said: "Don't write i at the end of a word - change it to y? In other words we're changing i to y (at the end of a word) instead of changing y to i (in the middle of a word). In a compound word we also keep the 'rule' about no i at the end of each part. As well as this, we need to change i to y before a suffix beginning with i, to avoid a double i like we get in the (non-native) word skiing.

So we write tries, tried and trial, but we can't write tri for the first form of the verb (because native English words don't end in i) so we spell it try. And we can't write triing, because we don't have double i, so trying.

Let's look at more examples, to test it out:
We write babies, but baby (end of word), babysit (compound word) and babyish (avoiding double i).
We write happier, happiest, happiness and happily, but happy (end of word), and happyish (avoiding double i).
We write reliable, reliance, and relied, but rely (end of word) and relying (avoiding double i).
We write beautiful, beautify and beautician, but beauty (end of word).
We write said, but say (end of word) and saying (avoiding double i).

OK, it works ... but I'm trying to decide if this is a better way to look at it or not. There are pros and cons.

Pros
There are fewer (if any) exceptions. As long as we are talking about native English words, they don't finish in i (except the pronoun I).
The fact that a vowel before a y stops it changing to i becomes irrelevant. If there's already a y, we don't need to change anything.

Cons
The base forms that end with y aren't usually the problem when it comes to spelling. It's the longer forms that are usually more tricky. These usually contain i.
When we teach, we usually start with base forms and later deal with inflections and suffixes.

My conclusion
Turning this rule on its head is probably more accurate and easier to understand but would involve teaching words in an unnatural order. So I probably wouldn't use it with low level students, but at a higher level, if students were having difficulty, I might well point it out.

So has this little experiment been a waste of time? No, I don't think so, because it's always useful to question what's generally accepted as true. Another perspective is always useful.

What do you think?
I would love to hear your comments on this.

Word endings - which letters are not at the end?

It's always easier to learn something if you know the reason for it. In the PowerPoint presentation below we see which letters are not usually found at the end of native English words and how this affects spelling.

Please feel free to use the PowerPoint as you like and share it widely. Just two rules:

1. Please don't change anything in it (if there's anything that needs changing, please write and let me know) 
2. Always link back to The Spelling Blog. Thank you.

The embedded version below doesn't have animations. You may think that's a good thing! But actually if you want to use the presentation for teaching it's better to have them - helps learners focus on new information better. So here's a version with simple, useful animations: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9063559/Word%20endings.ppsx 

In the next blog post, I'm going to discuss something from the Never-Ending Letters presentation that I think is pretty revolutionary! Any idea what?

Anyway here it is. I hope it's useful. I'm really interested to hear any reactions (in the Comments below).

Never-ending letters - teaching and learning the spelling of English word endings.

View more PowerPoint from jomango (that's me!)

Oh no! There was a mistake on the presentation. It's now been corrected so if you downloaded it on or before 28 March, please re-download. Sorry  - and thanks to my father for noticing!

Johanna

Spelling 'one' and 'two' - lexical spelling

I write this on a once-in-a-century day! The date is 11/11/11 - the only day in a hundred years when all those numbers are the same - lots of lovely ONEs. To celebrate and honour the number one, let's look at its spelling.

Learners have asked me "Why do you spell one without a w although you pronounce a w in it? And then why does two have a w when you don't pronounce it?" Great questions!

So why? The simple answer is that these two words are not phonetically spelled. Their spelling shows lexical or semantic links with other words - we are spelling by meaning not sound. All of the words below contain the letters o-n. Can you see how each of them relates to the idea of one?

one, alone, only, lonely, once, none

And how about two? (I'll deal with that now as I may not still be blogging on 22/2/22!) Where did that w come from? Again - it's about meaning not sound. What's the link with the number 2 in these words containing tw?

two, twenty, twice, twelve, twin, between

Pointing this pattern out to learners can help prevent them writing *tow*, instead of two, and mixing the homophones. It also helps them to see there is some logic and that you shouldn't rely too much on sound when spelling.

Some questions for you:

• Can you think of any more words related to the number one that include the letters on (together)?
• And any more tw words related to the number two?
• Do you know other sets of words in which the spelling can be learned by linking meanings rather than sound? (There are more in my book.)

Answers in the Comments please.

 Johanna

Vowel patterns - Three in a Row Vowels Activity

Learners seem to have many more problems with spelling vowel sounds than consonant sounds. This isn't really surprising as English has only five vowel letters for about 20 vowel sounds, including diphthongs. (For consonants there are 21 letters and 24 different sounds, plus silence.) So vowels need to be used in combination (digraphs and trigraphs) to make certain sounds. Also, unstressed vowels are often pronounced with a schwa /ə/ (like the last syllable of teacher), regardless of the spelling. Added to this, some languages give much less importance to vowels - Arabic and Hebrew, for example - and learners may not realise the precision needed in English.

So, what to do? How can we help learners spell vowel sounds accurately? Here is just one activity from my book which helps learners to notice and practise vowel digraphs.

I hope you find it useful. Feedback always appreciated. 

22.4

Three in a Row Vowels

Aim: To give practice with vowel patterns. (See pages 131 and 135 of book for rationale)

Materials needed: Pencils. For each group of four learners: One game board — enlarged to A3 if possible; two different coloured sets of cards, also enlarged to A3 and cut - these are available on The Spelling Blog downloads page.

Activity:

1.       Learners work in groups of four (or up to six if necessary). Each group has two teams. Give each group two different coloured sets of vowel pattern cards — one for each of their teams. Also give them one game board. The cards are shuffled and placed in a pile, face down, in front of each team.

2.       One team turns up the first card. They make a word containing that vowel or pattern that matches one of the categories on the game board. They write the word in pencil under the pattern and place the card on the game board on top of the relevant category.

3.       The next team turns up one of their cards and does the same. The game continues until one team gets three cards in a row, horizontally, vertically or diagonally. So as well as trying to make a row of three, learners need to stop the opposing team from winning a row.

4.       To play again, learners need to rub out the words they have written on the cards.

Variations: Boards and cards can be laminated for reuse. Then learners write their words with a non-permanent pen (e.g. overhead projector pen) and these can be washed off after the game.

You may want to set a time limit for the creation of each word.

At the end of the game, everyone writes personalised sentences for the words they used to help them remember the spellings within a sentence.

For an easier version of this game, each team spreads out all their cards in front of them and they can choose the pattern they use to make a relevant word.

You could use this idea to make your own game with different spelling patterns or different topics.

Spelling Plants - Guest Post by David Warr

I'm really excited to have a guest blogger today! And such an amazing one! David Warr produces plants - language plants that show how language grows, how words are related and work together. These not only give wonderful visual clues to the langauge but are also delightful to look at and explore - some are so lovely you think they are going to be scented! You can see more of them on David's site ( http://www.languagegarden.org/ ) and in his extraordinary book.

Over to David...

I first met Johanna at IATEFL in Liverpool in 2004 Our websites share similar names, and it is right that non-botanical gardeners stick together. (My website is called Language Garden,  Johanna’s is an English specimen). I am a great admirer of Johanna and her work, and it is a pleasure and privilege to be invited to scatter a few seeds here today.

The Spelling Blog shows the need for treating spelling and the problems it causes with respect. Although we cannot assume that spelling will take care of itself, it can get pushed into corners and not given due attention. But, coupled with activities that promote speaking, thinking and creativity, spelling activities can easily slot into lessons as smoothly and as naturally as we might focus on the mispronunciation of a word. It’s another string to our bow.

The table in Johanna’s recent post http://thespellingblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/look-say-cover-write-check-template.html showed how we can focus on the different properties a word has. The columns that differentiate this table from the more common, but less focused Look-Say-Cover-Write-Check get learners to look at certain features of the word, of their choosing. This might be something unusual about the word, such as a rare spelling pattern that needs to be learned by heart, or the opposite - a spelling pattern that is common to many other words, and by learning to spell this one word, it opens the door to a number of others. Learning is about discovering and applying rules, and testing their boundaries. The trick is to find rules that are easy to remember, simple to apply and useful across a wide spectrum.

I commented on this post with a personal anecdote. My problem was that I could never remember how to spell questionnaire and millionaire. They both end in aire, but one n or two? I didn’t know. And eventually my patience snapped and I employed a personal technique which I will share with you here, called language plants.

These are a visual way of presenting language. They look for patterns and remove repetition and redundancy. Here is the one I made for the two words.



Ugly? Weird? Confusing? What adjectives come to mind?

Fascinating too, I’d say. Have you ever seen a solitary tree on a windswept cliff, so exposed to the prevailing gales that its branches are permanently distorted and bent? It’s its unusual but perfectly explainable and adapted form that is so spellbinding. Its shape is its essence.

I think the same is happening here. You see, this language plant is reflecting reality too. I learned that the two words do not follow the same rule. Millionaire has one n, but questionnaire has two. They’re different, and by sharing the letters they have in common, I’ve had to twist them all so that we can see both spellings at the same time. Look how the little green n that belongs to questionnaire is trying so hard to squeeze in between the other n and a. But millionaire is resisting. “You can’t come in,” it is admonishing, “you’re not part of me. Stay away!”

Colour helps too. Millionaire is grey, questionnaire is green. That’s why the intruding n is just green, while other letters are both grey and green. “We have no allegiance” they are announcing. “We belong to both,” they are confirming.

I thought I was satisfied.

Until the next time that is, when I had to spell one of them, I can’t recall which. Yet again, I had to reach for my weighty dictionary that owns a part of my desk. All I knew was that it could have one n or two. Ahh, but which? I had only solved half the problem. My quest was incomplete. Another language plant I needed.

“A millionaire has money!” True enough, but importantly here, these two words have just one n. The words are semantically and graphically related and the language plant shares on, so these letters are bigger. And this time I was satisfied.

All in all, I had invested mental energy, sifted through language, first in finding a word, money, that was related to one of the words, and then by creating the two images that presented the spelling patterns. This is another way of helping learners with spelling, a way that uses many intelligences and senses, not least visual, spatial and kinaesthetic, which is what Johanna’s table does so splendidly. And if you’ve got a rough piece of paper handy, you could try copying these out. Then next time you have to write either of these awkward words, well, hopefully your hard work will pay off.

Guest post by David Warr

'i before e' rule - Stephen Fry and friends

Stephen Fry claims there are over 900 exceptions to the 'i before e' rule. You could argue with his figures. Some of his guests do, but ... well, watch for yourself:



Johanna

The Language Show - Full-Body Spelling Workout

For a Full-Body Spelling Workout, come along to The Language Show in London on Sunday 17th October 2010.

Details about The Language Show.

So what is a Full-Body Spelling Workout? The Spelling Blog regulars will know that I favour multi-sensory methods of improving spelling. This session will be wall-to-wall multi-sensory activities for all ages. It will include:

• Ways to help students write similar-sounding words
• Ways to help weaker spellers visualise words (as good spellers seem to do naturally)
• Things to do with your hands (that help to remember spellings)
• Things to do with your brain (that help you to remember too)
• A spelling gym  - been meaning to do some exercise? Learn spelling at the same time!
• A chance for your feet to get in on the act too.

In fact, participants will go away with a brainful of short, fun, effective spelling activities that are great for warmers and energisers.

My session, (whole title: Hands-On, Eyes-On Feet-On! Full-Body Spelling Workout) is on at 13.15 (till 14.00) on Sunday 17th Oct.

By the way, volunteers will be invited to participate in a great game that you need to take your shoes off for, so make sure there are no embarrassing holes in your socks ;-)

Hope to see you there. 

Johanna

Prefixes and suffixes - online activities

I've just come across this little spelling activity from the BBC which I can put directly into my blog. It's a gizmo for practising prefixes and suffixes. Have a go:



What I like about it is that it teaches about prefixes and suffixes rather than just tests. There are loads of spelling activities on the web that are great if you just want to test your spelling. Most of the people I work with have problems with spelling and so they need help, not just something that reconfirms that their spelling is poor.

Let us know if you have other sites that have teaching rather than testing activities for spelling.

By the way, thanks to the award-winning teachertrainingvideos.com for leading me to this. There are other spelling sites examined there too, but most of them do test rather than teach. The notable exception is the wonderful Spelling City which I've written about before here.

Other related posts on The Spelling Blog:
Spelling Long Words - Prefixes
Confusing Prefixes - dis and dys
Confusing Prefixes - anti and ante
Look Say Cover Write and Check

' wa '

(Update: I've just updated this post for two reasons: a) The Blixy Zoom Words isn't working so I've used plain old writing; b) I needed to make it clear this post was about British English pronunciation)

Look at these words. What do you notice about the sound and the spelling?
wander, want, watch, wash, swallow, warrior, swap, wannna

And now these:
walk, wall, war, warm, water, wardrobe, warning, towards, dwarf

Hopefully you noticed that all the words begin with, or contain, the letters wa.

In British English in the first lot, the wa sounds like it should be spelled wo - we hear the sounds /wɒ/ : watch, swallow, was, etc.

In the second graphic, the wa sounds more like 'wor' (war) or /wɔ:/ walk, warning, award. But if you look carefully, you'll see that the wa in these words is mostly followed by r or l (except in water).

So......?

Are these rules? No, they can't be rules because they are not definite enough. There are exceptions such as water and also a very few words where the wa makes a more phonetically regular sound of /wæ/ like in wax (and another word that's not polite enough for The Spelling Blog!) and a few other pronunciations. But there are patterns to be seen.

Are these patterns useful? Yes, I think it's worth raising awareness of this. Nobody ever pointed this out to me and I just thought a lot of these words were phoneticaly irregular, but it's reassuring to see a pattern.

However I would feel happier if I could find an etymological reason for this pattern - believe me, I've searched. Any ideas, anyone?

By the way, when I finally finish my Teaching English Spelling book (before summer 2010, I hope), there will be an awareness-raising exercise about the wa spellings.

Plurals of words ending in 'o' - when to add 's' or 'es'

I made this - just for you!

Plurals Of Words Ending In ‘O’

View more presentations from jomango.

When two vowels go walking - Is it the truth we're talking?

There's an English spelling rule that native-speaker children are taught:

"When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking - it says its name."

It means in a word like bean, the e is pronounced (with the long sound like the name of the letter E) and the a is silent. Here are some more examples:

boat
toe
rain
tied

And here is a video about it for kids. Beautifully made, cute and convincing ...

http://pbskids.org/lions/videos/twovowels.html

BUT ...

... I was going to write about this 'rule' in my book (Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners). First thing that happened was that I was a bit stuck for examples. Then I got suspicious and decided to check it out. I wrote all the possible vowel digraphs (two written vowels together that make one sound), such as ae, ai, ao, au, ea, ei, etc and I put them into a concordancer at http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html

And what did I find? I found this rule was just not true. It only works for a few digraphs and then not always. Look, these ones generally do work:

oa - coat, load, approach, goal, etc (most words with oa make the o sound and the a is silent, except if it's followed by an r: board, coarse)

ai - rain, paint, rail, failure, etc (this one is pretty good too but some common words don't follow the rule: said, pair, etc)

ea - sea, beans, easy, please, beach, etc (this one sometimes behaves according to the rule but look at all these exceptions (and there are lots more) : leather, already, early, appear, break, bread, etc)

Some pairs have a few examples
ui - juice, fruit, suit (but not liquid, build, guide, biscuit and many more

ei - ceiling, receive but not height, eight,

oe - toe, woe, goes, potatoes but not in shoes, does, poem, foetid or canoe

ue - blue, true but not in guest, league, queen, affluence and any more.

And the others really do not follow this rule at all. At best there are two or three words that follow the rule for these combinations, but generally none,
ae, ao, au, eo, eu, ia, ie, io, iu, ou, ua, uo.

Now those of you who follow my work know that I don't give a fig for 'rules' in spellings. We can only look at patterns, or precedents, and make guesses. But it does annoy me to think that children are taught 'rules' like this when they're just not true.

Do you agree? Are you a teacher who has taught this 'rule'? Can you justify it? Do you know any other 'rules' that are not true? Is a 'rule' that's partly right better than no rule at all?

The reason for love? And dove, above, done, wonder, come and some.

Have you ever wondered why we spell love, some, done as we do rather than *luv, *sum and *dun? The reason may surprise you.

Middle English manuscript was less rounded than ours is nowadays and it was largely made up of vertical strokes, called 'minims'. Also 'u' and 'v' were often interchangeable - written as 'v' at the beginning of the word and 'u' in the middle. So you can imagine that that letter strings of 'uv', 'um', and 'un' were pretty hard to work out - just a row of minims. So to make it easier to read, scribes started to make the 'u' into a more rounded 'o' in several words: love, dove, glove, above, shove, cover, oven; done, one, wonder, money, son, monk; come, some, etc. They are all spelled with 'o' but make the short 'u' sound, as in cut. (This explanation from David Crystal in The Encyclopedia of the English Language, p40.)

That still leaves the question of the final 'e' in some of the words above. In Old English, if there was a final 'e', it was pronounced. Words ending with this sounded 'e' were later dropped and that meant that a final 'e' could be used for other orthographic purposes. We know that the most common of these is to make the preceding vowel long, as in huge as opposed to hug or rate instead of rat. But the 'e' is also used for several other purposes. And one of these seems to be to tell us that the preceding vowel has been messed with in some way. Another reason for the final 'e' in some of these words is that there's an orthographical rule that English words can't end in 'v'. So an 'e' is added to make the spelling 'legal' in such words as give and live (vb).

Going back to the medieval manuscripts, at that time the letter 'i' had no dot and so Frank Smith (Writing and the Writer) suggests that's why women is spelled as it is - an 'i' (without a dot) between the four minims of a 'w'** and the three minims of the 'm' would be really hard to work out. And just think what the word minim would look like!

**'w' was sometimes written with a completely different letter (sorry, Blogger doesn't have that font!) and sometimes with 'uu'.

Spelling bees - how do you spell...?

The spelling bee is a very North American concept. These spelling competitions have never really become popular in the UK, but in 2005 the BBC did run a series called Hard Spell. Children competed against each other to find the best speller - it went on for weeks and drew good audiences I think. But it seems once was enough for the British public.

The Times newspaper has an online spelling bee - compete against yourself or others. I'll give you the link but it comes with a warning: if you are quite a good speller - it's very addictive, if you are not a good speller - it's depressing. If you're really sure you've got time / self-esteem to spare: http://www.timesspellingbee.co.uk/Default.aspx .

While I was playing with the Times spelling bee game (I told you it was addictive) I was trying to work out HOW I knew the spellings that I knew.

Sound
It was partly by sound, but certainly not exclusively. And sometimes I had to distort the real sound (like saying com-fort-able instead of comf-table to spell comfortable), not something we want to encourage in second language learners.

Sight
It was also partly visual - I could usually see the word in my head, at least the rough shape of it. If I took time to glance at the word on the screen, I could tell immediately if it was wrong, even if I didn't know the right spelling.

Patterns
Sometimes I just followed orthographic patterns. I knew to write the suffix 'able' not 'abel', and of course I knew that I needed a 'u' after 'q' in acquaint. I knew that acknowledgement had to keep the 'e' before the suffix to keep the 'g' soft (in British English).

Morphology
Other morphological rules really helped, as they are generally very regular. I knew prefixes had to be added to whole words and when I needed to double a letter before a suffix. I also had a bank of prefixes and suffixes in my head that I could select from. Sub and terra were useful for subterranean. Such chunks have become fairly automatic - I don't have to think about them letter-by-letter.

Lexical spelling
Sometimes I had to relate a word to another semantically linked word: for zealot I had to refer to zeal, I got the 'c' in vivacious because I thought of vivacity.

Etymology
Some understanding of etymology can help too. Although the English word facile isn't one I write often, the French word facile is much more common, so I probably referred to that. There are also certain Greek letter strings that I needed such as 'ch' for /k/ in chronology, or the 'y' in dialysis (like the more common analysis).

Learning by doing
It was also quite a kinesthetic process. My fingers just typed many of the words, or at least parts of those words. The ones I got wrong (oh yes, there were certainly several of those!) tended to be words that I never normally write and that I couldn't relate to any other words or parts of words. And I think my spelling was worse than usual because the words were out of context. I believe that if I'd been writing them as part of a text they would have been more likely to flow out accurately - but perhaps I'm just making excuses!

Teaching and learning spelling
So what does all this tell us about teaching and learning spelling:

• sound indicates spelling sometimes but is probably the least reliable route. And if your pronunciation isn't too good anyway, it could mislead you.
• visual methods of spelling should be encouraged - it's what good spellers do, and weaker spellers can learn to 'see' words too.
• it's worth learning, or at least noticing, some orthographic patterns - great to refer to when we are unsure.
• for long words, breaking them up morphologically can really help. Learners need to know a range of affixes and rules for adding them to words.
• semantic links between words need to be explored and spelling patterns will emerge that often explain a spelling that at first looks completely irregular
• an acknowledgement that English is rather a mongrel of a language and an awareness of some common spellings handed down from different languages can be helpful
• the more we write, the better our spelling gets as it becomes increasingly automatic - both in terms of words and letter strings, so learners need to write often and meaningfully. Writing for an audience will encourage them to aim for accuracy.

And all that, my friends, is what my book (soon to be published) is about - with plenty of activities to help learners discover and practise. For more about it click on the cover below:

Homophones - How not to teach them.

Last week I blogged about homophones and what they are. This week I want to look at how to teach and learn them and this can be summed up in one word - don't!

What???

Danger! Homophone lessons.

It's true homophones can cause confusion but lessons on homophones can introduce confusion where there was none. By pointing out to learners that 'there', 'their' and perhaps 'they're' have (about) the same sound but different spelling, we may be drawing attention to a difficulty in spelling that they have never had - and it could even spark off that confusion. It could plant a seed of doubt that stops them automatically writing 'there' (in, for example, "There are four people in my family"). They may find they have to stop and think about it now, and may come to the wrong decision.

Sure, if learners are already confused, we can acknowledge that different words sometimes have the same sound. But lists of homophones, or gap fill exercises where learners have to choose between two homophones, are not going to help them.

So what's the alternative?

Focus on other words that LOOK the same rather than SOUND the same. And show how words that look the same are often related:

So show that:

• here, where, there are all related to place and all contain h-e-r-e.
• hear, ear, heard are all related to perceiving sound and all contain e-a-r.
• two, twice, twin, twelve, twenty, between are all related to 2 and all contain t-w.
• one, once, only, none, alone, lonely are all related to 1 and all contain o-n.

This is much more learnable than looking at these confusing homophones:

• hear/here,
  
• where/wear,
  
• there/their,
  
• heard/herd,
  
• to/two/too,
• one/won,
• none/nun.

So beware! The internet is full of these lists and interactive games for practising homophones. They may be fun for good spellers but for the confused, being super-confused is no fun.

Confusing prefixes: dis- and dys-

Disconnect, dislike, dishearten, disabled but dyslexia, dysphasia, dyspepsia.

These two prefixes, dis- and dys- seem to have very similar meanings - making a word negative. But it's a little more complicated than that.

Dis (from Latin, meaning apart) is much more common, so if you're not sure use this (dis). It makes a word negative, such as dislike. Or it can mean to reverse something: like disconnect

Dys-, on the other hand, comes from Greek and so is almost always used for medical or scientific words. It means bad or abnormal. So if you have dyspepsia you are not digesting your food well, people with dyslexia have some problems with language.

Confusing prefixes: anti -/ ante-

Prefixes tell us a lot about the meaning of a word but there are some pairs that sound the same or similar and look pretty similar too and so they are confusing. In the next few posts I'm going to look at some of these tricky pairs to help with spelling long words.

Anti- and ante-

Anti- means against. So we have anticlockwise (but counterclockwise in US English), antivirus, antiperspirant, antidepressant, antiseptic, antibiotic. And we can add can also add anti- to other words to create new words. You may hear people talk about someone being anti-technology or anti-Obama.

What interesting anti-s have you heard or used lately? Leave a comment to tell us.

Ante-, on the other hand, means before, in time or position. So antepenultimate means the third from the end (before the penultimate); antenatal refers to something before a baby is born (when a woman is pregnant); an anteroom is a room where you may be asked to wait before going into another larger room leading off it.

Anti- is much more common that ante- and we don't usually make new words with ante-.

One last thing: when do we use a hyphen ( - ) between these prefixes and the base words? The rules of hyphenation are not very strict (different dictionaries give different answers). I haven't found any ante words with a hyphen. When adding anti, generally if the base word starts with a or i or a capital letter use a hyphen, otherwise don't. So an anti-ageing cream may contain antioxidants. And an antiracist would probably be anti-Nazi. New words that you make up or hear should probably be written with a hyphen if they haven't yet made it to a dictionary.

'i' before 'e' - the trouble with rules

Last week in the UK there was an item in the news saying the government was telling primary teachers they shouldn't teach their children the spelling rule :

" 'i' before 'e' except after 'c' "

Look at the words below and make up your own mind. How many of these words follow the rule:

Image made by me at Wordle (click on thumbnail to go there)

So is it a good rule? There are SO many exceptions to this that it is confusing. Some people say you should use a fuller rule:

When the sound is ee, 'i' before 'e' except after 'c'

or

'i' before 'e' except after 'c' or when sounded like 'a' as in neighbour and weigh

But they still have exceptions and those rules are now becoming long and complicated. So I agree with the British government (for once) - it's probably not worth teaching.

But what has really interested me about this has been other people's reactions to it in the media. This business about dropping this particular rule was one short paragraph in a 124-page document called Support for Spelling. But the Shadow Children's Minister said:

"Having systematically lowered school standards for a decade, it is sadly no surprise that the Government is now actively telling teachers not to bother trying to teach children how to spell properly."

He added: "The best schools in richer areas will continue to teach children how to spell and the victims of this dumbing down will be, yet again, poorer children living in poorer areas."

Ummm...but this is in a 124-page document detailing some excellent ways to approach English spelling. What is he talking about?

And then I read this from a senior English lecturer at King's College, London:

"It's a very easy rule to remember and one of the very few spelling rules that I can remember and that's why I would stick to it.

"If you change it and say we won't have this rule, we won't have any rules at all, then spelling, which is already terribly confusing, becomes more so."

Both quotes from here.

So she thinks a bad rule should stay because then it makes it look like we have one rule in English rather than none - and that is supposed to be helpful?

And in a discussion about the subject on another site a lot of people called Keith and Sheila had something to say about this rule!! One Keith said it wasn't until he was 25 years old that he learnt how to spell 'their' - when he suddenly realised that the 'ei' was the same as the 'ei' in his name! I've always said we should encourage learners to link what they don't know to what they do know - it took Keith a while but he eventually got there!

(By the way, I was asked to speak about this on National Public Radio - but unfortunately I got the message too late. The item is here, but it's obviously not me speaking.)

As always there'll be more on this and other 'rules' in my book "Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners"

British and American Spelling - spelling successfully reformed?

I've been asked several times to write about the differences between British and American spelling. I started to make a list and then got a bit bored, because there are lots of other such lists on the web. So at the end of this posting I'll link to some sites where you can find them (Check carefully though - some lists say that the British version of bank is *banque - rubbish! It's bank of course.) And there will be a much fuller exploration of British and American English in my book which I talked about in the last posting here.

But today let's look at how US spelling came to be different from English spelling. The big mover and shaker was Noah Webster. In "An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation" (phew - NOT a snappy title Mr Webster!) written in 1789, he says

It has been observed by all writers, on the English language, that the orthography or spelling of words is very irregular ... The question now occurs; ought the Americans to retain these faults which produce innumerable inconveniencies in the acquisition and use of the language, or ought they at once to reform these abuses, and introduce order and regularity into the orthography of the AMERICAN TONGUE?

Mr Webster thought reform was definitely needed. And he proposed the following changes:

1. "The omission of all superfluous or silent letters." So he wanted bread to be bred, friend to be frend and give to be giv.

2. "A substitution of a character that has a certain definite sound, for one that is more vague and indeterminate." This would give us *neer for near, *laf for laugh, *blud for blood, *wimmin for women and *korus for chorus.

3. "... ch in French derivatives should be changed into sh". So you would do your washing in a *masheen and a *shef would work in a restaurant. Other French spellings would also go, leaving us with *toor (tour) and *obleek (oblique).

4. "A trifling alteration in a character, or the addition of a point would distinguish different sounds, without the substitution of a new character." So here he proposed putting a little line across th to distinguish the voiced and unvoiced sounds. And he suggested using some dots over vowel letters to differentiate them.

Some of these suggestions were adopted at least in part but many of them the public just refused to use.

• our got changed to or, so colour became color, but it never got as far as *culor.
• re at the end of a word became er, so the British theatre became the US theater but for some reason not always (American National Theatre) and acre didn't become acer (because it would change the pronunciation).
• Cheque got shortened to check, but unique didn't ever make it to *uneek (or *yooneek).

So was it a good idea or has it just made spelling more complicated, especially for those learning English as a second or foreign language? Certainly American spellings do look at first sight more logical and regular. On the other hand, there are now often two different spellings to learn, the British and the American. And there are still a lot of inconsistencies. If the reforms had been more complete, maybe this would have been more useful but now there are perhaps more opportunities for confusion, not fewer.

And another issue for me is that English orthography seems to purposely use different spellings to distinguish between most homophones. So check and cheque sound the same but are spelt differently to show they have different meanings. Also tire (to get tired) and tyre (black rubber on the wheel) deliberately, I think, have different spellings. In simplifying these for US English, that difference is lost.

So what about spelling reform generally - does it work? My feeling is that it's something that comes naturally to a language and it's a difficult thing to force on the native speakers of that language. It wouldn't surprise me if *alot replaced a lot, not because anyone in authority has said it should but it is the way many native speakers write it. And maybe u will become the new spelling of you. Capital letters may die out (or is it just a phase we're going through?) and the days of the apostrophe seem numbered (except that it appears where it shouldn't!).

I'd love to hear your opinions:

• Is US English easier to spell than British English?
• Tell us about other varieties of English (Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Indian, Carribean, etc, etc)
• Can spelling reform work?
• Has it worked in other languages that you know?
• What other English spellings do you think might change?
  

Oh, and the links I promised you:
For a full list of the differences between US and UK English (and some other varieties):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences
A bit more user-friendly if you just want to check something quickly:
http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/egw/jones/differences.htm (but beware of *banque)
And if you want to read more from Noah Webster (where the info above came from):
http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/DKitchen/new_655/webster_language.htm

Johanna