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
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