Learning Written Language: 5 things to know for improving reading and spelling instruction.

Phonemes

phoneme phoneme: A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.
Example: the sounds /t/ and /d/ are represented by the letters t and d are two english phonemes. The word cat contains three phonemes /c/ /a/ /t/.

Graphemes

grapheme: A grapheme is the smallest unit in a written language system representing a phoneme.
example: The letter k represents the sound or phoneme /k/ while the letter c is the grapheme that can represent the sound /k/ in the word cat or the sound /s/ in the word city. The letters sh represent one phoneme /sh/.

Word Structure

Syllables & Morphemes

syllable: a segment of speech usually consisting of a vowel with or without accompanying consonant sounds

morphemes: the basic building blocks of words and each morpheme has an associated meaning.

Etymology

Etymology: the history of a word or a morpheme. It can also help identify morphemes within a word.

Orthography

Orthography: The orthography of a language is the correct way to write in that language. The word itself is of Greek origin combining the words 'orthos', meaning correct, and 'graph', meaning to write or draw.

Structure of English?

Once in a course titled "Methods of Teaching Language Arts" I remember a professor stating, " The English language is totally unpredictable. Take the word 'overwhelmed', is it possible to be 'underwhelmed'?" He went on to explain through the course that children will develop in both reading and spelling the more they are exposed to the written word. This was based on the theory that spoken language and written language develop in the same manner. One important fact is overlooked in this common sense theory is our brains are genetically "hard wired" to learn spoken language. Written language is an invention of man, a code. our brains are not "hard wired" for written language. Explicit instruction is more effective for students learning the code of written language rather than solely exposure to written language over time.

The professor had it partially right, rather than being "totally unpredictable" our language is better defined as non-standardized. English is a complex combination of different languages and their corresponding linguistic systems. In order to understand English, we must explore these linguistic systems and how they interact to form the complex structure of our language.

Why bother?

Experts say that somewhere between 70-80% of students can pick-up the complex conventions of our written language without explicit teaching. What about the other 20-30% of students? Explicit teaching of these linguistic components has benefits for all students. It raises their meta cognitive awareness of the English language by improving their understanding and comprehension of our English language structure. Since English is a combination of different languages that bring their unique linguistic systems into our language, studying these different components and how they interact is an opportunity to expose students to systems thinking. Systems thinking is an approach to analysis that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system interact with other parts of the system.

English is certainly complex, but there are many benefits in studing it's components. This site is not designed to be a comprehensive resource but rather a way to expose educators to the major components of the English language.