We may have all seen some word wall or another which contains words that have to be memorized or learned by heart because they are irregular. Some of the supposed irregular words include: have, give, said, they, come, their, and one. They are considered irregular because there appears to be a mismatch between their spellings... Continue Reading →
C for chair and S for shoe: Understanding the difference between graphemes and letters
<b> <c> <ch> <d> <f> <g> <gh> <h> <j> <k> <kn-> <l> <m> <n> <-ng> <p> <ph> <r> <s> <sh> <t> <th> <u>* <v> <w> <y>* <z> <-ck> <-dg(e)> <-tch> <x> <qu> <wh-> <gu> <-ugh> <wr> <rh> <ai>/<ay> <au>/<aw> <ea> <ee> <ei>/<ey> <eu>/<ew> <ie> ... Continue Reading →
Clues of History Buried in “Friend”
Fri + day --> Friday Fri + end --> friend Fri (e) nd --> friend Friend is one the most frequently misspelled words: misspelled by both children and adults alike. Why is that? Why do children have difficulty learning the correct spelling of a word they know so well and use so often both in... Continue Reading →
Writing the ‘sound’ /k/ in English
Before I begin, I would like to explain certain concepts to make it easier to read the post. I use the forward slashes // to enclose pronunciation, while the angle brackets <> enclose spelling. The term 'graphemes' means a spelling units. Graphemes represent distinct pronunciations. I enclose graphemes in angle brackets: <ck>, <c>, <k>, <qu>.... Continue Reading →
Making Sense of ‘t’ in English
English spelling and reading can sometimes present challenges due to some of the complexities of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Several graphemes (spelling units) represent more than one pronunciation and a single pronunciation can be written using different graphemes. However, the complexities of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences provide us with valuable information about words. How a word is... Continue Reading →
