Words Their Way

Words Their Way

Stages of Writing / Spelling Development

Emergent Beginning Transitional Intermediate Advanced

PreK to middle of

1st

K to middle of 2nd

1st to middle of

4th

3 - 8 5 - 12

Emergent Letter Name -

Alphabetic

Within Word

Pattern

Syllables & Affixes

Derivational Relations

Reading StageGrade RangeSpelling Stage

Alphabet Pattern Meaning

Synchrony of Literacy Development

Stage 1• Emergent Spelling – scribbles to

partial alphabetic representation w/o word boundaries

• Emergent Reading – Pre-Alphabetic / Logo-graphic - (pretend reading to memory reading)

• PreK to middle of grade 1

Words Their WayStages of Development

Stage 1: Emergent Stage

• Emergent stage is a period of pretend reading and writing.

• Pretend to read retelling w/pictures and then rehearsing and reciting well-known poems and jingles to heart.

• Pretend writing / Scribbles to partial alphabetic representation w/o word boundaries. Writing is based on language and can be talked about. IKSKP (p.89 4-1)

• Gradually acquire directionality.

Early Emergent •Random Marks•Representational Drawing•Drawing starts to become distinct from Writing

Middle Emergent •Letter Like / Mock Linear•Drawing becomes distinct from Writing•Symbol Salad (some recognizable letters/numbers)

Late Emergent •Partial Phonetic (some letter sound matches)•Consistent directionality•Use of letters (some directionality but no word boundaries)

Emergent Writing Evolution p.90-91

• Humans do not actually speak in words. • Speech is prosodic. • There is no such thing as an isolated

phoneme. • Words and phonemes are artifacts of print and

do not naturally coincide with acoustic realities such as syllables.

Therefore…………………………..

• Concepts of word and phoneme must be taught.

• Both will emerge as children gradually acquire alphabetic principle and coordinate the units of speech with printed units on the page.

• By the end of the Emergent Stage, children begin to show some degree of phonemic awareness as they begin to use inventive spellings. p.104 fig. 4-10

– As alphabetic knowledge is acquired, children will spell using the most salient (outstanding) sounds in the speech stream they write.

1SPNTM (Once upon a time) tangible points of utterance where

one part of the mouth touches another or sounds that make the most vibration / receive the most stress

P. 92 fig. 4-4

In the Emergent Stage, sorts and activities should focus on –

1. Vocabulary growth2. Phonological Awareness3. Alphabet knowledge 4. Letter – Sound Knowledge (PHONICS)5. Concepts of Word in print

Such as……………………….• matching word cards to individual words to

rebuild familiar rhymes and jingles to foster the concept of word.

• Sorting objects, pictures, and some words byconcept, beginning sound, and rhyme

Only H(aitch), W (doubleyou), and Y (wie) have no beginning – sound association in the letter names and make these letter names often more difficult to learn.

A writing component can be added to many alphabet games to incorporate letter formation which is often a neglected component of early literacy instruction. (This can add a muscle memory connection for acquiring letter-sound knowledge.)

Examples of Sorts for the Emergent Stage

?

Closed Sort: Animals / Non-animals

Animal Picture Sort

MonkeysBears

Dogs

Food, Clothes and Toys

Beginning Sounds b,m

• M and S is a good choice for students’ first consonant contrast because both letters have continuant sound that can be isolated and elongated without undue distortion.

• B and P should not be contrasted in an early sort since they are both articulated the same way and only sound differently since one is voiced and one is unvoiced.

• Knowing how groups of letters are articulated in the same way helps to explain many of the interesting things children do in their invented spellings.

• This knowledge of articulation helps teachers to make decisions about setting up picture / beginning sound sorts so that letter sounds that are much alike are not contrasted in very early letter – sound sorts.

• 6th Principle of word study: Begin with obvious contrasts! p. 100 – Fig.4-1

• Guidelines for beginning sound picture sorts p. 101-102

• As children learn the alphabet and the sounds associated with the letters, beginning sounds will anchor finger pointing more directly to memorized recitation of text indicating the onset of a concept of word in print.

• Instructional activities for Emergent Learners p. 106 Table 4-2

• Children in the Emergent Stage benefit most from a comprehensive approach to instruction and early intervention.

• A comprehensive approach includes five essential literacy activities. RRWWT is important so that activities and materials flow together in a logical way. p.106 Table 4-2

1. Read To2. Read With3. Write With4. Word Study5. Talk With

By the end of the Emergent Stage, children will• Learn to segment onset and rime• Show evidence of a Concept of Word• Apply inventive spelling using some letter

sound correspondences

Stage 2: Letter Name - Alphabetic StageA Period of Beginnings

• Letter Name – Alphabetic Stage is the beginning of conventional reading and writing.

• They use the sound/letter match to write..• Initially in this stage, the students spell using beginning and ending

sounds. • By the middle of this stage, students begin to use a vowel in each

syllable, and begin to spell short vowel patterns conventionally. • They use Finger-pointing to show an acquired concept of word . Beginning – Rudimentary Concept of Word Mid – Late – Full Concept of Word • Recognize some sight words. • Disfluent / Word by word readers who fingerpoint and read aloud

to themselves

• Page 130 Table 5-1Examples of Letter Name Alphabetic Spelling for

stick• Early - SK• Middle – sek• Late – stik

One effective way to manage teacher directed Word Study is to include it as a part of each guided reading group several times a week.

Letter Name Alphabetic Spellers • Have both names and sounds for letters• Understand that words can be segmented into

sounds and that letters must be matched to these sounds in order

• By middle of this stage, students include a vowel and spell short vowels by matching the way they articulate the letter names of the vowels. Ex. /i/ as “e” & /a/ as “a”

• By the end of this stage, students have learned to spell many short vowel words correctly.

Characteristics of Letter Name – Alphabetic Spelling page 132

What Students What Students What Is Do Correctly Use but Confuse Absent

Beginning Middle End

Middle and Late Letter Name-Alphabetic Spelling

• Differentiation between consonants and vowels

• Clear letter sound relationships• Frequently occurring short vowel words.

Letter Name Alphabetic spellers rely on what they hear in the letter names and also on how the letters are articulated or formed in the mouth.

• Affricatives – (made by forcing air through a small closure at the roof of

the mouth creating a feeling of friction )• j, g, ch, dr, tr, and the name for h (aitch) make the

affricate sound and are often substituted for each other

• Voiced and unvoiced consonant pairs are also often confused by letter-name alphabetic spellers.

van / fan brave/BRAF oven / OFN

Saying the words aloud as they sort helps students feel the sound differences for affricates and voiced / unvoiced consonant pairs.

Voiced and unvoiced consonant pairs should only be contrasted after students have mastered most sounds and need to focus attention on finer sound distinctions.

• Early letter name –alphabetic spellers have much difficulty separating vowels from consonants.

• Medial vowels are described by the state of vocal cords when the sounds are produced. Long / tenseShort / lax

Letter name – alphabetic spellers become adept at fully segmenting words into phonemes.

RAIN-ran BOAT-bot LINE-lin

Short vowels are spelled with the letter name closest to the place of articulation of the short-vowel sound they are trying to write. BAT-bet PIT-pot POT- put p. 137 fig.5-2

The CVC pattern is introduced in the late letter name – alphabetic stage.

(Regardless of how many consonant letters are on either side of the single vowel (cat, clap, clack), one vowel letter in the middle signals the short-vowel sound. )

Word Families

Short Vowel Family: a. Sort by pictures that sound alike at the end (-at, -an) b. Sort by words that sound and look alike at the end.

Closed Picture Sort

Letter Name – Alphabetic spellers work through 5 orthographic features following initial consonants.

1. Short vowels2. Consonant digraphs3. Consonant blends4. Preconsonantal nasals (blends w/ m, n,

& ng)5. R, L, and W influenced vowels R-influenced vowels that follow a CVC pattern (car, for) are

presented during the late letter name-alphabetic stage and can be compared w/ short vowels

Consonant blends w/ r (fr, tr, gr) are contrasted with r-influenced vowels (from – form, grill – girl, tarp – trap).

Digraph sorts and a closer look at blends:

• Level A vs. Letter – Name Alphabetic Materials

Teachers should set as fast a pace as possible during

the letter name-alphabetic stage because success in

beginning reading depends on learning the basic phonics elements that are covered in this

stage.

Letter Name – Alphabetic Stage Scope and Sequence p.140 Table 5-3

Word Banks and Personal Readers p. 141

Contrasts for digraphs, beginning & final blends and preconsonantal nasals p. 143-144

Introduction to r-influenced vowels ar & orPace & Sequence of Word Family Study p.145 Table 5-4

• Word families (phonograms) support students first efforts to analyze vowels because the vowel and the ending letter(s) are presented as a chunk or pattern.

Rime – the vowel and what follows Onset – what comes before the vowel

37 rimes can be used to generate 500 different words that students encounter in primary reading materials

These chunks will be familiar in chunks in thousands of multisyllabic words.

• Difficult Consonant Sounds in English for Spanish Speakers p. 151 Table 5-5

• Sample Weekly Schedules for Word Study in the Letter Name – Alphabetic Stage

p. 152 Table 5-6“There are many blends and word families to cover. You might want

to create 2- or 3- cycles. Ex. Introduce 2 word families on Monday, another two on Wednesday, and then combine them for several days. Pick up the pace by combining a number of blends or families into one sort (up to 4-5) or by omitting some features. Your observations should dictate the correct pace for your students.”

Within Word Pattern Stageand

Transitional Readers

Stage 3: Within Word Pattern Spelling• Students build on their knowledge of the sound level

of English orthography and explore the pattern level. • Students are in the transitional reading/literacy stage.

Transitional readers read most single-syllable words accurately and with increasing fluency. They can read some multi-syllable words when there is enough contextual support.

• Students in the within word pattern stage use but confuse vowel patterns. They no longer spell boat sound by sound to produce BOT, but BOTE, BOWT, BOOT, or even boat as they experiment with possible patterns for the long –o sound.

Within Word Stage (cont.)• The study of prefixes and suffixes is explored in the next

stage, syllables and affixes. Increasingly, however, the reading and language arts content standards of many states are requiring that students are developmentally in the Within Word Pattern phase.

• These words should be explored first as vocabulary words students encounter in their reading, and are not treated as spelling words until students know how to spell the base word on which they are built.

• The sequence of word study in the Within Word Pattern

stage begins by taking a step back with a review of short vowels as they are compared with long vowels then shifts to common and then less common and r-influenced long vowel patterns.

By the middle of Within Word Pattern, Students are spelling many of the most common long vowel patterns correctly in high-frequency words, but less common and “other vowels” (ambiguous vowels and r-controlled vowels) will pose problems.

By the end of Within Word, students will have mastered nearly all the long vowel patterns on the inventory.

• Characteristics of Within Word Pattern Spelling p. 172

• During Within Word Stage, students begin to recognize patterns and chunks to decode unfamiliar words. Fluency increases as transitional readers begin to read in phrases, pausing at the end of sentences, and they read with greater expression

• Homophones are rich fodder for vocabulary development in the Within Word Pattern stage

• Mastery of vowels is complicated by : p.1751. More vowel sounds that letters to represent them

so vowel pairs and silent vowel markers are used 2. Most vowel sounds are spelled a number of ways3. There are many types of vowel sounds: long, short,

r-influenced, diphthongs, and other ambiguous vowels that are neither long nor short as well as l, r, and w influenced vowels.

P. 175 & 180 Tables 6-1 & 6-2

• Despite the complexity of vowels, by the end of the within word pattern stage, students have a good understanding of vowel spelling patterns.

• Knowledge of vowel patterns is a prerequisite to the examination of the way syllables are joined during the next stage of development, the syllables & affixes stage.

• In addition to sound and pattern, the meaning layer is critical to learning vowel patterns as with homophones and homographs.

What about high frequency words?• A number of spelling programs feature high-frequency or high-utility

words and focus on a small core of words students need the most such as said, because, there, etc.

• In many cases, this reduces spelling to a matter of brute memorization and offers students no opportunity to form generalizations that can extend to the reading and spelling of thousands of unstudied words.

• Many of these high-frequency words do not follow common spelling

patterns, but can be included in within word pattern sorts as oddballs. Ex. Said is usually examined with other words that have the ai pattern, such as paid, faint, and wait. It becomes memorable because it stands alone in contrast to the many words that follow both the sound and spelling pattern feature.

• Most of the top 200 most frequently occurring words according to Dolch and Fry are covered by the end of the Within Word Pattern Stage.

High-Frequency Words p. 181-182

Guidelines for Creating Word Sorts

• Sorts that contrast sounds and patterns are the key to effective word study in this stage. Possible contrasts are suggested in Table 6-2 (pages 180-181) and lists of words in Appendix E.

The Within Word Pattern Spelling StageCovers – 1. Short & Long Vowels Contrasts2. Common & Less Common Long Vowel Patterns3. R-Influenced Vowel Patterns4. Diphthongs & other Ambiguous Vowel Sounds5. Beginning & Ending Complex Consonant and

Consonant Clusters6. High Frequency Words and Contractions7. Inflectional Endings for Plural & Past Tense8. Long –a and Long –i Homophones

• Word Study Notebooks in the Within Word Pattern Stage p. 186

• Word Hunts• Homework p. 187-188• Games and Activities p.188 - 201

Weekly and Review Spelling Tests• Weekly tests at most grade levels are recommended.• Students should be accountable for learning to spell the words

they have sorted and worked with in various activities all week and will ideally be very successful on these weekly tests.

• If students miss more than a few words, it may mean that they need to spend more time on a particular feature/contrast or that they are not ready to study the feature and should work on easier features first.

• Periodically, review tests should be given – without asking students to study in advance – to test for retention.

• Weekly spelling test grades should NOT be their only spelling grades. Students should be held accountable for features already mastered in their daily writing.

• Be creative with spelling tests. ( if there are 25 words in the weekly sort – use a random drawing for 10 and then use a couple of words found in their word hunts that follow the patterns for the sort but were not included in the given word list for the weekly sort)

Intermediate Readers / Syllables & Affixes Stage

Students have reading vocabularies that are typically far in advance of their spelling ability and can often read words whose meanings elude them. Consider semantic difficulty of words in sorts as much as the spelling challenge.

• begins in 2nd and 3rd grades for some students & 4th Grade for most• engages students in examining how important word elements-

prefixes, suffixes, and base words combine • structural analysis of words is a powerful tool for vocabulary

development, spelling, and figuring out unfamiliar words during reading.

• Explore compound words and homographs• Discover inflectional endings, -s, -ed, -ing that change the

number and a tense of a base word but not its meaning or part of speech.

• Discover open/closed syllables • Reexamine vowel patterns in two – syllable words • 3. How stress or lack of stress determines the clarity of the

sounds in syllables• Explore ambiguous vowels in two syllable words• Examine base words ( free morphemes ) and simple

derivational affixes• Examine silent consonants at the beginning of words• Explore the spelling of words with hard and soft c & g• Explore new vocabulary presented in content areas

Strategy for analyzing unfamiliar words p. 205

1. Examine the word for meaningful parts- base word, prefixes, or suffixes.

If there is a prefix, take it off first. If there is a suffix, take it off second. Look at the base to see if you know it or if you can think of a related

word ( a word that has the same base) Reassemble the word, thinking about the meaning contributed by the

base, the suffix, and then the prefix.2. Try out the meaning in the sentence; check if it makes sense in the

context of the sentence and the larger context of the text that is being read.

3. If the word still does not make sense and is critical to the meaning of the overall passage, look it up in the dictionary.

4. Record the new word in your word study notebook.

Page 214 Further exploration of consonants to make generalizations about

the spelling of hard & soft g and c, silent consonants, and other consonant pairs foreshadow the in-depth study of spelling meaning connections explored in the next spelling stage………………derivational relations.

P. 220 Guidelines- It is fine to select a few words that students might not know the meaning of, or words that they only know tenuously, but do not overburden sorts with these words. (Looking a few words up in a dictionary as a part of the initial demonstration lesson is a good way to encourage regular dictionary use for an authentic reason.

Sequence and Pacing --------Page 217 Table 7-3

p.218 – “Word Study Routines and Management – Word Study instruction takes place all day long in incidental discussions with small groups and large groups, but most students will need in-depth systematic attention to features at their developmental level as well.”

• P. 219 Word Study Lesson Extensions for Word Study Notebooks.

• 1. Find words that have base words and underline the base word. • 2. Break words into syllables and underline the accented syllables. • 3. make appropriate words on your lists plural or add –ing or –ed. • 4. Circle any prefix and /or suffix, when possible, to words on your list. • 5. Add a prefix and /or suffix, when possible, to words on your list. • 6. Select five words and use them in sentences. • 7. Sort your words by parts of speech or subject areas and record your

sort. • 8. Go for speed. Sort your words three times and record your times.• 9. Select five words to look up in the dictionary. Record the multiple

meanings you find for each word. • Oral and written reflections encourage students to clarify and summarize

their understanding.

p.219“The key to finding time to meet with

small groups is establishing routines. When students learn weekly word study routines, they become responsible for completing much of their work independently (both in class and at home) or with partners, and this leaves teachers free to work with other small groups.”

Advanced Readers / Derivational Relations Stage• In contrast to syllables and affixes stage,

exploration of words at the derivational relations stage draws upon more extensive experience in reading and writing.

• Usually in upper elementary, middle, high school, and well into adulthood

• At first glance, misspellings at the derivational relations stage appear similar in type to those at the syllables and affixes stage ( at juncture of syllables and with the vowel in unaccented or unstressed syllables)

• There is reciprocity between growth in vocabulary and spelling knowledge and the amount of reading and writing in which students are engaged (e.g.,Carlisel, 2000; Cunningham & Stanovich, 2003; Mahony, Singson, & Mann, 2000; Smith, 1998

Characteristics / Derivational Relations Stage

• Specific spelling errors characteristic of this stage fall into 3 main categories.

• 1. In polysyllabic words, there are often unstressed syllables in which the vowel is reduced to the schwa sound, as in the second syllable of opposition. Remembering the root from which this word is derived (oppose) will often help the speller choose the correct vowel.

• 2. Suffixes like the -tion in opposition also pose challenges for spellers because they are easily confused with –ian (clinician) and –sion (tension), which sound the same.

• 3. Other errors occur in the feature known as an absorbed or assimilated prefix. The prefix in opposition originally comes form ob, but because the root word starts with the letter p (pos), the spelling changed to reflect an easier pronunciation (obposition or opposition?)

• Sequence of Word Study / Derivational Relations Stage

Table 8-1 (p.234-235)Consonant Alternation, Vowel Alternation,

Adding –ion to Words, Greek and Latin Elements, Advanced Suffix Study, Absorbed Prefixes, Content Area Vocabulary, and Word Origins

• While the intermediate reader (syllables and affixes) picks up syllabic chunks, the advanced reader (derivational relations) picks up morphemic chunks.

• S&A -------- mor-pho-lo-gy

• DR---------- morph-ol-ogy ……………crossing syllable boundries