Lenaya and I spent another session enjoying the sumptuous language of Steinbeck. Growing up on the East Coast, I I had certainly heard of The Grapes of Wrath, but I had not spent much time exploring the author's writing. So it was with great pleasure that I explored The Red Pony with this delightful middle schooler.
Lenaya paused after reading the words <immense> and <tremendous>. Were they related to one another? She has some understanding of twin base (alternant) elements from Latin, so she thought the words might share a <mend/mense> base. They both seem to have the connotation of being "really big." In context, the pony Gabilan "aimed a tremendous kick at the boy." As the horse galloped, it "went thundering and enjoying it immensely." Thinking of prior explorations of words such as <extend> and <extension>, where the Latin 4 principle parts are <tendo, tendere, tetendi, tensus>, the 2nd and 4th principle parts come into English as the twin base alternants <tend> and <tense>. Might there be a similar connection with <immense> and <tremendous>? The possibility of a <mend/mense> base was intriguing, and in this case, seemed like a reasonable hypothesis, so we tried to analyze the words with a word sum to see if we could discover the structure. We tried: <im + mense> *<tre + mend + ous>. We looked next in etymonline to check our hypothesized word sum for the first word. The term <immense> was fascinating. It appears to have started as 18th century slang, meaning "without measure" and eye rolls ensued when it was used to intensify words. I can imagine it could be compared to "hella" as in "That was hella good pizza"--a standard (but somewhat dated) usage in my adopted home state of California. Before looking up <tremendous>, we tried to find evidence of a *<tre-> prefix. We couldn't think of any, so we entered the letter sequence <tre> in Wordsearcher. Finding a few tenuous candidates, we did a structure and meaning test with <trepidation> and <tremulous> <temblor> and <trembling>. In etymonline, we discovered they all have a denotation of "shaking" from the Latin tremere and ultimately the PIE root *trem. And similarly, <tremendous> was used in exaggeration, just as <immense> was. Huh. So, the two words are not related at all, but share a connotation of extraordinarily good! That was certainly a surprise, but a happy one. After analyzing the words <immense> and <tremendous>, we discovered that looks can be deceiving. Just because two words might look like they are related doesn't mean it is so. Structured word inquiry is a scientific way of looking at a word's meaning, how it is built, discovering its relatives, and finally looking at the phonemes and graphemes that are apparent in the word. The cautionary tale here: beware WYSIWYGery! What you see on the surface is not necessarily the whole story. What was the outcome? We discovered the story of two new words, along with a host of relatives. It was time well spent in leisurely scholarship.
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*Lenaya, a rising 7th grader, is spending the summer with Steinbeck, reading The Red Pony now (and The Pearl later). While she is driven to improve her reading fluency and vocabulary, these short stories are a stretch. The vocabulary and sentence structure are unfamiliar, as are the experiences of horses (and pearl diving). The conversations we have include not only word study (the 4 questions of Structured Word Inquiry), but online searches for photos and videos to help immerse my budding scholar in the world of horses while she reads this book. To get started, we are reading The Red Pony in Kindle format. I set the font size a bit larger, and used the OpenDyslexic font with a sepia background. In the last few tutoring sessions, we've been introduced to the cowhand Billy Buck, the disciplinarian father, the sometimes angry, yet secretly proud mother, and Jody, a young boy of ten who, in the beginning of the story seems to have some anger-management issues. He is evolving into a responsible young man in this story. Lenaya has been highlighting the traits of each character, trying to get a sense of how this family functions. Today's session introduces us to the red pony . "Its tense ears were forward and a light of disobedience was in its eyes. Its coat was rough and thick as an Airedale's fur." Jody has been combing and currying the young pony in anticipation of the day when it is old enough for him to ride. One part of this session includes compound words. I am currently taking a Real Spelling class on Hyphens, Hybrids, and Blends, so the hyphenated compound words just popped off of the page. Lenaya knows that a compound word includes more than one base element used together to create a new meaning. Today she learns about different kinds of compounds. Below are 4 types with examples from The Red Pony: Closed Compound:
Open Compound: There is one stress (a big clue that you have an open compound).
Hyphenated Compound:
Connected Compound (base elements with a connecting vowel letter):
The vocabulary in this short story is so juicy, both for delight and investigation, that we dive right in! We look up a few pictures in Google (the Morocco saddle, a bridle and bit, and a horse drinking from a trough), we look up a few videos (and listen to a horse whinnying), and, of course, head over to Etymonline to learn more about <incipient> and <spirited> among other words. The word <trough> with its <ugh> trigraph and /f/ phoneme merits a quick review. The words <shepherd> and <embers> and <burro> are a surprise. Lenaya knows the word <burrow> and is surprised that a <burro> is actually a donkey, not a hole in the ground! A quick Google photograph brings her up to speed. The following bullets summarize a rich lesson, and leave us wanting more next week! Interesting Vocabulary:
Complex sentences and unfamiliar phrases (we practiced reading these several times and discussed their meaning):
Unfamiliar experiences or concepts (we looked at a photograph negative and talked about "breaking" a horse so that it could be ridden. Lenaya talked about teaching her puppy to tolerate a leash):
The depth of knowledge I've developed in Real Spelling and SWI are invaluable to the work I do with Lenaya and my other student scholars. I have taken all of the Spellinars offered by Real Spelling several times and attended a number of SWI workshops with WordsWorkKingston. I also participate in ongoing scholarship with a community of scholars in the Facebook groups "Structured Word Inquiry" and "Structured Word Inquiry in the Classroom" to name just a few. If you are interested in learning more, you are welcome to join these communities. I encourage you to take online classes and attend workshops, and most importantly to wonder about words and investigate them! This is an invigorating, welcoming community. Resources: The Red Pony, by John Steinbeck etymonline Word Searcher by Neil Ramsden Mini Matrix-Maker Type IPA Real Spelling Spellinars Title pony image courtesy of Jim Pickett, ©, 2015 *A pseudonym I began work with *Lena, a 7-year old rising 2nd grader, this week who was recently assessed and given a diagnosis of dyslexia. She is delightful, charming, and eager. When I first met her, she ran to get an iPad, wanting to show me a story she had read a number of times from her Raz-Kids subscription. After a "warm" read of Five Brothers, we talked about how the look-alike brothers used their gifts to fool the magistrate who had imprisoned one of the brothers. Working together, they were able to overcome an apparently insurmountable task, a requirement for the brother's freedom. Sounds like there is a good life lesson in there! In weaning students from a phonics-first approach, I often start with noticing the graphemes in words to see how they are represented in text. There is certainly some phonology involved, but the phonemes (akin to "sounds" but the focus is on the shape of the mouth and the breath as opposed to what is heard with the ears) and graphemes (one to three letters that form a single phoneme or an orthographic marker) are an integral part of the morphology and etymology of the English language. My goal is for students to learn the interrelationship of morphology, etymology, and phonology to help them understand the way English writing system works. In the beginning, I often start with the 4th question in SWI: "What graphemes function coherently...?" since phonics has been the primary instructional method at this age. I quickly invert the questions to begin with meaning in subsequent lessons. In school Lena has been immersed in a phonics-based program which begins with a focus on "letter-keyword-sound" for consonants and vowels called Fundations. As a way to meet her where she is and take her to the next step, we went on a hunt for words in the text with the grapheme <s>. She discovered that the <s> can represent many different pronunciations: /s/, /z/, /ʒ/, and /∅/; notice the angle brackets for the grapheme, and the slash brackets for the phoneme. We’ll discover later that it also represents /ʃ/ as in <sugar>, and, who knows?, maybe there are other phonemes for <s>. She was fascinated with this approach. See the slideshow below. I introduced Lena to the IPA symbols to represent the pronunciations for the grapheme <s>, but I won't expect her to write them, just recognize them as a tool used to differentiate pronunciation from spelling in order to further differentiate phonology from phonics. We can also use her bilingual ability in her favor here because IPA can represent pronunciation in any language, regardless of spelling. That would have come in hand when I was traveling through Wales with my family (see Welsh road sign in slideshow)! As she found words with <s>, we grouped them according to their pronunciation. Then we looked more closely at a few words. I asked her what she thought the <s> meant at the end of <brothers> and <tears>. She was able to tell me that it meant "more than one." I asked her how the <s> in <treasure> was pronounced and she said /ʒ/; notice the <s> is followed by a <u> and came through French, originating in Greek as thēsauros. This made my day because I think of a thesaurus as a treasure trove of words! The pronunciation of <treasure> in English gives us not only a clue about its origin, but also which spelling we might use. Think about <measure> and <pleasure> for comparison. One surprise is that sometimes graphemes have no pronunciation at all within a word. In the word <island>, for instance, Etymonline tells us that the <s> was inserted in the 16th c. as a mistaken association with <isle>. Lena also noticed the word <squeeze> in the text as we were finding words with /z/ spelled <s>, so I said that we can also look at the pronunciation first and look for the graphemes that represent the spelling of the phoneme. The words <is> and <squeeze> represent two ways to spell the phoneme /z/. This lesson took all of about 30 minutes before we moved on to math for the rest of the session. Tomorrow, I'll drop a matrix and word sum into the mix and see where it takes us! *Lena is a pseudonym. Sources: Etymonline Word Works Kingston Another aha! moment came together this morning, having percolated all week. It was a convergence of a student's innocent question, a local community Spanish class, a Latin seminar, a solid weekend of research, and a scholarly conversation with colleagues over the course of a week. This morning, it led to my hypothesis. The student's question was quiet and simple: "Is the base of <representation> <s>? The question grazed my brain, not entering at that particular moment. In fact, I wrote a complete blog post about the first question the student asked, "Why isn't there a <z> in <represent>? That piece of writing sparked a bigger idea, though. Let me rewind to Thursday a week ago. In my community education Spanish class, the teacher spoke about "elision." In a Spanish sentence, if you have a vowel at the end of a word, and a vowel at the beginning of the next word, the vowels elide, or become one. For instance, the phrase, "¿<Qué es eso>? becomes, in effect, ¿/Quéseso/?" when it is pronounced. I had also learned, a few weeks prior, about the contraction of <a>+ <el> which becomes <al>, meaning "to him." On the next Saturday, I took one of a series of classes with a group of scholars, studying Latin poetry--specifically this day, Lucretius', De Rerum Natura. Here is an excerpt: ...multa elementa vides multis communia verbis, cum tamen inter se versus ac verba necessest confiteare et re et sonitu distare sonanti... Translated here as... "many elements common to many words, although you must confess that lines and words differ one from another both in meaning and in the sound of their soundings." Notice that the two words <necesse+ est--->necessest> are pushed together in an elided compound, the poet's choice here. The week prior, elision was discussed, but I was not ready to hear it, and it simply washed over me, seeding itself somewhere in my brain, ready for the Spanish class later in the week. I had spent all day before the Latin class, and the rest of the day after, immersed in a scholar's pursuit of a matrix for <represent>. The student's question niggled (caused "slight but persistent annoyance, discomfort, or anxiety") at the back of my mind: "Could the the base be <s>?" The student and I had been working through matrix after matrix over the last several months, collecting prefixes, bases, and suffixes, elements that the student had clearly internalized. We looked at a number of possible analyses of the word <represent>, and at that moment, I was not ready to understand how that could be. Then I asked the question in a group of scholars, "How is <represent> analyzed? I had discovered that its etymology was *<re + present> from <prae> "before" + <esse> "to be", but I felt like I was missing something, and there were other topics being discussed, so it kind of washed over the group. However, later that evening, a colleague wrote to me, saying that she had long ago explored the words <absent> and <absence>, sensing also that the prefix <ab> left wanting the question of the base. She proposed at the time <abs + ent> and <abs+ence>. It wasn't a completely satisfying matrix to her, so my earlier question brought her matrix back to the surface. Here are the notes I jotted down before bed last night: Food for thought:
This morning I woke with a start and started ruminating on a dream I had, "Is <s> the base of <represent>? I lay there thinking, "Elision, contraction...<re> + <pre> + <s> + <ent>. Yes!...Maybe!" The sense and meaning of the <s> is "to be!" If you are "present" or "present something", you "are before" someone, or "are in front of" them. If you are "absent," you "are away from." Oh, my goodness! Today, I met again with my colleagues in scholarship, and we took a deep dive, exploring the evidence. We talked about reconceptualization and the influence of orators and scholars (Caesar for one) in the creation of new words to filll a void in the language. I was filled with wonder at how a simple question led to such a rich discussion in the company of other scholars. In summary, an innocent question from a student posed to a curious teacher, researched thoroughly, and shared and discussed in a group of scholars lends credence to this hypothesis. It might not have happened at all were I not immersed in Latin, Spanish, scholarly conversations, linguistics, etymology, morphology, and, yes, phonology. I also spent time in the company of other scholars actively parsing the evidence and looking at suggestions of other words to explore in the future; it was an afternoon well spent. In light of the research, I propose a new matrix. Talk among yourselves. I'm gonna get a cup of tea. Resources: Etymonline.com Loebclassics library A Band of Scholars ❤️ What is IPA? A good friend of mine started to read one of my blog posts the other day and said, "I saw these squiggles, /waɪ ɪz ðɪs soʊ kənˈfjuzɪŋ/, and I wasn't sure if they were supposed to be there or if there was something wrong," like a formatting error or something. I started to explain what they were, but decided she can't be the only one who finds them puzzling. The IPA symbols looked like a foreign language to me just a few years ago, so I thought it might be good to talk a bit about it here. IPA symbols, now called the International Phonetic Alphabet, is an abbreviation for the International Phonetic Association symbols. Somewhere along the way, the symbols started to be called an alphabet, but the symbols are not an alphabet. They are a set of symbols created to represent one-to-one correspondence with the "sounds" of any language; really, though, it’s what happens in your mouth when you talk--the way air flows (or does not), where your tongue is in your mouth, how your lips are shaped, and whether your use your voice (or not). This is the gist of it, and it's not just about what you hear. Think about playing the game of telephone. When you hear and pass on a word or sentence to the next person, by the time it gets to the last person, we all know it is often not what the first person said at all. The phonemes /m/ and /n/ and /t/ and /p/, for example, are difficult to differentiate by ear. They are often misheard, and the reason we say <t> as in <Tom> or <p> as in <park> when we're telling someone how to spell something on the actual telephone. My Fair Lady and the Linguist The primary function of IPA symbols is to allow anyone to be able to accurately represent the pronunciation of a word, without reference to its spelling. You can even differentiate someone's accent when reading a transcription! It's really very useful and akin to those dictionary pronunciations we learned as kids, but way better. Think of Professor Higgins when he was transcribing Eliza Doolittle's cockney accent, about two minutes into this video. He was using an early form of IPA. How to Use IPA with Structured Word Inquiry That's cool, you say, but why do I need to know how to use it? For one reason, IPA is a useful tool for using Structured Word Inquiry to answer the 4th question: "What graphemes function coherently here?" Looking at the symbols is a critical first step to expanding the understanding of phonemes beyond the one-to-one letter-sound relationship that students grow up immersed in with a phonics-first approach. Why is that important? When we teach, <s>, /s/, <snake> (letter, sound, word/picture cue) in kindergarten, and a student encounters words such as <is>, <sugar>, or <vision>, they're confused. If we represent these words in IPA, then it becomes obvious pretty quickly that the grapheme (single letter, in this case) <s> can represent more than one phoneme--as in /sneɪk/, /ɪz/, /ˈʃʊɡər/, /ˈvɪʒən/. Notice the /ɛɪ/? That's the "long <a> sound." Say it slowly. You can feel your mouth shift in this diphthong, so it is represented with those sequential symbols. To Show Pronunciation Change with Prefixes & Suffixes Additionally, In base elements like <sign>, we learn that, while the pronunciation of the element shifts when affixes are added, the meaning of the base stays the same--so the spelling of the base stays the same.
To Show How Shifts in Stress Affect Pronunciation Here is a way of visually demonstrating changes in pronunciation of the graphemes when the base is affixed and/or when the stress shifts:
The Word <been> and the 4 Questions The word <been> represents a conundrum with students. Why is it spelled that way? It's not an exception, but rather a great opportunity to show that meaning and structure are critical to spelling. Here is an example of how I investigate <been> with students using the 4 questions of Structured Word Inquiry (see slideshow for question details). 1. Meaning: <been> is a form of the verb <be>. I want to <be>; I have <been>. 2. It is built <be + en>. The first <e> in <been> is part of the morpheme <be> (a free base element). The second <e> is part of the suffix <-en> used grammatically to shift the verb tense. Wait, what? Yes, we have evidence of the suffix in <take/ + en--> taken> and <bit(t) + en--> bitten>. These two words also demonstrate the suffixing conventions of replacing the final, nonsyllabic <e> and doubling the final consonant when a vowel suffix is added to a base with a single consonant preceded by a vowel. 3. Its relatives include <be>, <being>, <become>, <befriend>. The base <be> can be affixed and used to make compound words. The matrix below was made with mini-matrix maker. 4. What are the graphemes that function coherently here? The phonemes in the base <be> function as expected /bi/, (with the "long <e>" sound in a short word), but the pronunciation has nothing to do with the use of the vowels in the word <been>. The phonemes in <been>, in this case, do not help with the spelling at all. It’s all about the meaning and structure. Depending on your accent, <been> could be transcribed into IPA in several ways:
This is SO useful when introducing students to the seemingly "crazy" spelling of <been>. Imagine trying to spell it by sounding it out. You might get <bin>, <ben>, <bayen>, or <bean>. You might get lucky and spell it <been>, too. But IPA symbols help differentiate between pronunciation and spelling. Here is a link to a pronunciation guide for each of the symbols and word examples with British and American English differentiation: Antimoon, and here is a recording from the UCLA's linguistics department. Why Use IPA in the Primary Grades? So, why do I use IPA symbols in the primary grades? In a public school, I was asked once how students are supposed to learn the alphabet and IPA symbols at the same time? Imagine if we did! Schools in other countries (especially with multilingual communities) use IPA. Language learners use IPA to help with pronunciation. One of my favorite websites to learn about pronouncing American English is Rachel's English. She has all manner of interesting lessons as well as an online English Academy. Here is a link to Why We Need the IPA. It's well worth a look! For additional examples, take a look at these words with the same graphemes <o> and <th>: <love> /lʌv/--the <o> is represented with /ʌ/ <move> /muv/ the <o> is represented with /u/ <think> /θɪnk/ the <th> is represented with the unvoiced /θ/ <mother> /mʌðɚ/ the <th> is represented with voiced /ð/ and the <er> is a combined schwa and /r/ or /ɚ/ IPA was very useful when I was trying to help 2nd-grade English language learners understand the grapheme <ch>. Having learned <ch> in isolation in the classroom as in the word <chop> or /tʃ/, it was easier to explain the <ch> spelling of words of French origin as in <chef> or <machine> with /ʃɛf/ and /mə'ʃin/ and the words of Greek (Hellenic) origin as in <school> and <chemistry> with /skul/ and /'kɛməstri/. My Favorite Way to Introduce Students to IPA By far, the most memorable use of IPA was with a class of 4th graders. I wrote their names in IPA (only), and they used an IPA decoder to figure out whose names were whose. I wrote the class names on chart paper which I kept up all year, and I added to it as students came in during the school year. I got this idea from Mrs. Steven’s Classroom Blog. Students noticed and remembered the symbols simply by interacting with them. The students whose names were always mispronounced gained the most, however. With IPA symbols, it was easy to introduce new students with difficult-to-decode names, and their names were learned and pronounced correctly from that day forward. I’ve also heard this question. "Do you teach the symbols like handwriting?" No. I may hand-write them for students to see, but I almost always type the symbols using the Type IPA site or copy and paste from the Mactionary (the dictionary on my MacBook Pro). You can use dictionary settings to change the pronunciation guide to IPA. Students don't have to learn to write in IPA because it's more about identifying a pronunciation and seeing whether there is a phoneme-grapheme correspondence, or demonstrating how the pronunciation shifts when the word has affixes. So What Does /waɪ ɪz ðɪs soʊ kənˈfjuzɪŋ/ Mean? So, if you're interested in IPA, you can take a class or pore over the websites I've included. Or just appreciate that the squiggles have a purpose in life. Finally, let's get back to the original question. What do these squiggles mean? /waɪ ɪz ðɪs soʊ kənˈfjuzɪŋ/. This is IPA for "Why is this so confusing?" Hopefully, it looks more familiar now, and you're intrigued enough to play around with IPA or explore more deeply! A student asked me this question recently, "Why isn't there a <z> in <represent>?" What would you say? How would you teach this? I thought back to my kindergarten and first grade classrooms when I taught in private and public schools. I taught the alphabet song, and letter-sound correspondences. When we use letters to represent sounds with young pre-readers, however, we send a message that reading and writing will be easy if they can sing the alphabet song and know their letter sounds. As soon as we go down the phonics road, we have to say that all the words that don't follow the alphabetic principle are exceptions or worse, save the interesting words in higher interest books for later.--and we have to think of ways to teach children these "irregular" words. As a long-time classroom teacher, I was frustrated with student's apparent inability to learn these words through various methods: word walls, personal dictionaries, weekly spelling tests, word sorts, and even Orton-Gillingham VAKT methods of looking, saying, tapping and writing with bumpy paper. I even went back to college (after earning an M.Ed.) to become a Reading Specialist. And still, teaching those sight words vexed me! For those students who have had extra doses of phonics and memorization, they arrive in 3rd and 4th grade with poor and seemingly intractable spelling habits. Around 5th grade, they get a smattering of Latin (and maybe Greek) prefixes, "roots", and suffixes, and we send them off to middle school where spellcheck takes over. Kids, by then, internalize that they are "bad spellers." What if, right from the start, we show students that the letters, digraphs, and trigraphs have flexible phonemes that demonstrate how rich our written language is? And for those most at risk of struggling, teach them that not only is there a rhyme and reason to our English spelling system, but that they can learn it, too. Why don't teachers know how to teach spelling? My experience is that linguists and teacher trainers have stayed in their silos, and teacher-training programs in colleges haven't been teaching prospective teachers how to teach spelling the way it actually works in English. I was taught how to use a teacher's guide, then took professional development training to teach me how to use balanced literacy: whole group, small group, and individual instruction, with leveled readers and a teacher's manual. When I discovered SWI (Structured Word Inquiry), which is not a program, but a scientific way of studying, analyzing, and synthesizing words, a huge window into linguistics opened, so I stepped through, and I haven't looked back. Let's look again at the question, "Why isn't there a /z/ in the word <represent>?" If we look at the word, it seems pretty straightforward. It looks like maybe there's a prefix, and maybe a suffix, but let's start with a framework for our research. I might look at this question with an upper elementary student, but this is a strategy you can use with early readers, too. With the 4 questions of SWI, there is a scientific framework to investigate a word to find not only its spelling, but its history and close family members, relatives, which share a present-day English base. In the slideshow image, "Found an interesting word?," you can see how the questions are arranged. Start with meaning, always meaning, first. The second and third questions are often interchangeable, but grapheme-phoneme connections are last, for a reason. Let's find out why: 1. What is the sense and meaning of <represent>? Note the angle brackets. That is the way linguists represent the spelling of the word. The meaning is "to act or speak for someone, to be a symbol for." 2. How is it built? Can you identify any bases or affixes with a word sum? Let's try several ways to analyze this word with a word sum. I'm going to put an asterisk before all of them because they are hypotheses until proven or disproven, and also because I went in confidently, thinking this was an easy one...
3. What related words can you find? So, this is why there is a double arrow between questions 2 and 3. This word <represent> is deceptive. I could jump right to the Word Searcher to look for relatives that share a base, but, I don't actually know what the base is yet! When the morphological base in PDE (present-day English) isn't obvious (and even if it seems to be), more research is necessary. Go to the Oxford English Dictionary or better yet, Etymonline. The story of the word is very likely to be there. Douglas Harper, creator of Etymonline, who I always imagine surrounded by a mountain of books, carefully researches the origin of words often back to their spoken roots, before they were written down. His bio is fascinating... as is the word <represent>! The word appeared in English from Old French (OF) in the late 14c. with a connotation of "to bring to mind by description." It's journey from Old French as representer, then further back to Latin as repraesentare, seems to indicate that it came as a whole word with the OF suffix removed. If we look at the Latin, and remove the Latin suffix from the second principle part (the Latin present tense infinitive), we have: <repraesent>. Huh. Where did the <a> go? Following the links to <pre->, then to <-prae->, we arrive at this: it is a "word-forming element" that was "reduced to <pre-> in Medieval Latin." Okay. So the word sum appears to be *<re + pre + sent>, but wait, there's more...It's a combination of <prae-> "before" (see pre-) + <esse> "to be." All this to say, that for the purposes of the word matrix, which is a synchronic (PDE) representation of a base and its relatives, we have a choice. Do we leave <represent> as a whole word, a free base element which has affixes in English, or try to break it down into <re+present>. I think, for the purposes of researching the word <represent>, I will leave it as a punctual derivation, brought into English from French (and Latin before it), to fill a need for a word that means "to symbolize, serve as a sign or symbol of; serve as the type or embodiment of." Just because we can, doesn't mean we should analyze a word any further than we have evidence. Take a look at the slideshow and see what you think. 4. And finally!! What are the graphemes that function coherently here? We, at last, get to the question, "Why isn't there a <z> in <represent>?" Let's look at the phonemes in *IPA symbols: /rɛprəˈzɛnt/. You can honor the student's perception of phonemes, including the /z/, yet through the other 3 questions, show that the <s> in <represent> originates from the Latin word <esse> and compare it to the word <is> in English. You could also discuss stress in the word and notice the schwa in the middle of the word where there is no stress. Take a look at the graphic to see four of the possible phonemes for the grapheme <s>. Note that the <s> next to the <u> in <sugar> can represent /ʃ/ or "sh"; the <s> next to the <i> in <vision> can represent <ʒ> or "zh"; and finally, <s> can represent /z/ in <is>, <has>, <was>, and even in <represent>. The slash brackets represent the phonemes. Are these all the ways to pronounce the grapheme <s>? I don't know, but if I run across a word later, I'll be happy to discover it! The letters in English can have flexible pronunciations and can be combined into digraphs and trigraphs. They can also be orthographic markers and zero allophones (a conversation for another post), but spelling is not merely a one-to-one correspondence with letters and sounds. Spelling is a system used to represent meaning to people who already speak the language, not to represent sound. The interaction of morphology, etymology, and phonology converge to assist the student scholar in learning more about the origin of words (etymology), the way words are built with morphemes (or individual units of meaning), and finally, about which graphemes to use. This is just one exploration with my students, and illustrates my current understanding of SWI. There is not one "right" answer where you say, "Right, I've figured that one out. I'm done." More often than not, an exploration like this one leads to more questions, more discoveries, and something that will surface again with deeper understanding in a future investigation. *International Phonetic Association I read a post yesterday based on Steve the Vagabond and Silly Linguist's FB page about the adjective suffix <-y> in English. I highly recommend joining his page if you're a word nerd with a sense of humor. Anyway, he was making the connection that English, contrary to its perception that it descended from a Romance language, is actually very much a Germanic language. One of his many pieces of evidence was the evolution of the <-ig> adjective suffix as in: <sunny>, from German <sonnig> and Dutch <zonnig>. The pronunciation of <-ig> at the time was more of an /i:/ (long e, if you're not familiar with *IPA symbols), so it makes sense that it was Anglicized to <-y.>, but it really obscured the visual connection that I made today.
I thought, “Oh! Now it looks like the element <-ic> meaning ‘having the characteristic of.’” I had taken a Real Spelling class about the Latinate <-ic> suffix, studying words such as <titanic>, <chronic>, and <athletic>, so I was primed to realize this connection. It was an “aha!” moment. I've seen the element <-ic> and connected it to the French <-ique>, but I had not considered the English <-y> to be related until that moment. Maybe I have brushed across it in previous encounters, but I was not ready to understand it at that moment. Of course, I went directly to Etymonline to verify my hypothesis, because a hypothesis is just a guess until you confirm your suspicions, right? The thing about scholarship is, when the light-bulb moment came, it felt like I had discovered it. The <-y>/<-ig>/<-ic>/<-ique> connection hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, and I felt once again that this is why I teach—to guide students to those moments of insight. This is the kind of experience I want for each of them. *International Phonetics Association Four years ago, I was a fresh face in the Structured Word Inquiry group, and had just had my first workshop with Peter Bowers, so I jumped in with both feet, using Pete's book Teaching How the Written Word Works as a primary resource. It was (and is) a good way to get started--to introduce the matrix and word sums, to introduce the 4 questions (see earlier post), and to teach the 3 suffixing conventions. There are also other activities that got me up and running as I learned the unfamiliar, yet enticing way to teach spelling and enrich students's vocabulary.
All was well for a while. This now-6th grader learned those basic concepts and moved on to other areas of the curriculum. However, he is again curious about those new "long words" that have crept into his vocabulary that he struggles to spell on his own. I believe he had reverted to approximating the spelling of these new words in his writing and lets spellcheck do the rest. Today, I shared one of my blog posts about the base <oxy>. He was engaged in a way that showed he was ready to learn more. This is one of the reasons I've created this blog--to have a resource that captures those moments with students and allows me to share my journey with others. My plan today was to review the toggling y/i suffixing convention. The student's plan was to create a matrix with <oxy>. This primary student's class was studying <oxygen> as it relates to the human body. While I initially thought it was more important today to focus on the suffixing conventions, he was eager. So we did. Who knew that a pretty non-productive base (in my humble opinion) would yield such an interesting discussion? We started with the 4 questions of SWI: 1.) What does <oxygen> mean? "It's air that you breathe." Okay, that's a good start. So then we looked it up on Etymonline to see if we could figure out when the word was coined, or when it came into our language. It turns out to have been coined in 1777 by a French chemist with a connotation of "something that produces acid." We talked about oxidization as when rust forms on metal ("like the tow truck in the movie Cars?") in the air. Copper turns green, and blood turns red when it is exposed to the oxygen in the air. 2.) How is it built? It appears to be built on two bound base elements: oxy + gen(e) --> oxygen, a compound word. Now, this is interesting because many people think of compound words as two free base elements (two words that can each stand alone): <note + book--> notebook>, but in fact, two bound bases, or one bound and one free base element can also create a compound word. 3.) What are its relatives? We used Neil Ramsden's Word Searcher to find words with the letter sequence <oxy>. The search engine includes many words with the letters <oxy>, including <boxy> and <proxy>, which do not pass the meaning test, so they are not relatives. Surprisingly, <oxymoron> and <epoxy> are relatives! The word <oxyacetylene> was fascinating, too. By mixing the two gases, a super hot flame is created to weld metals together. The student knew that oxygen was highly flammable. We used word sums and a dictionary to confirm their place in a word matrix. He did not want to include <oxymoron> because it had a bad word in it. And that's okay because you don't have to include every possible word in your matrix. Finally: 4.) What phoneme-graphemes function coherently in this word? Through repeated verbalization in spelling out o.x.y. in the word sums, the spelling of the phonemes wasn't interesting or necessary to this student. He has less to unlearn as an early learner, so he wasn't thrown by the "odd" spelling of the base. While we didn't discuss the phoneme-grapheme question deeply this week, we could have noticed a number of interesting things here.
This boy I worked with is a natural at shifting stresses in the word family. A few weeks ago, we were studying the base <fer>, with the word <conifer>, and he said, "Like a coniferous forest?" I pointed out to him that when the stress shifted in the second word, the <o> changed pronunciation from /ɑ/ to /ə/ (short a to schwa). /ˈkɑnəfər/ to /kəˈnɪf(ə)rəs/. We have and will continue to explore question 4 more deeply in subsequent lessons, just not today. If I had insisted that we focus on suffixing conventions today (when this student wanted to explore a word that had meaning for him), he wouldn't have been nearly as engaged. We looked at our veins with delicate blue lines that showed that the blood was depleted of oxygen and talked about why it looks red when you get a cut. Ah! Oxygen is in the air, so it turns red. We looked at the circulatory system, and he remembered the <circ> base that we had discovered a few weeks ago. This session reinforced the concept of blood <circulating> throughout the body and brought the lesson full <circle>. This first grader demonstrated dexterity with replacing the non-syllabic final <e> when analyzing the word sums. And we didn't question why the final non-syllabic <e> isn't in the word <oxygen>. Huh, a question for another day perhaps. And about the <y/i> toggling? He remembered from last week the three reasons not to toggle! So, no need for a review just yet. Happy student, happy tutor! While attending an International Dyslexia Association, Northern California event in 2015, Dr. Marcia Henry, one of the country's leading experts on reading instruction and dyslexia introduced me to Peter Bowers, Ph.D., of Word Works Kingston. He was doing groundbreaking work in teacher training using structured word inquiry (SWI) at the Nueva School in the SF Bay Area. Attending one of his workshops, I discovered that the interrelation of morphology, etymology, and phonology was the missing link for spelling instruction. He revealed the scientific basis for exploring words; using a word sum and suffixing conventions, the base reveals itself as part of a larger family of words that share meaning and structure. If the meaning is the same, the spelling is the same! The research is promising: young and struggling students benefit the most from structured word inquiry. Once I became familiar with the word matrix, I realized that phonics and memorization only scratched the surface of how our English writing system works.
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