| Why relate visual letter strings to meanings? |
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Research taster
Children find it hard to spell words that are not phonetically regular, even if they are morphemically regular. Even when they know that certain letter strings, such as ‘ed’ or ‘ion’ are possible endings for words, they often use these endings indiscriminately, in the right as well as in the wrong places. For instance, children use ‘ion’ more often in the right than in the wrong place (e.g. ‘emotion’), but they are very likely to spell words containing ‘ian’ (e.g. ‘electrician’) incorrectly.  When bits of words sound the same but have different possible spellings, your pupils’ phonetic knowledge cannot help them. Children do not simply catch the spelling of words like these but, if they understand the meanings of morphemes, this can help them decide which is the right fixed letter string to use.
Your evidence
You might like to gather a list of examples of spellings that make sense phonetically, but are actually incorrect, that have been used by your pupils. You could use these anonymously to illustrate ‘tricky spellings’ which include letter strings that sound the same, but don’t look the same. You might then like to ask children in your class to look out for homophones – words that sound the same but mean something different and also for letter strings within words that look different but sound similar. They could add examples to a display, or list on the board, during one week. At the end of the week, you could use this as a focus for them to discuss the meanings of these words and chunks of words and to see if they can find any patterns or rules. Moving forward Having identified and discussed different letter strings and made some tentative rules about their meaning or use, different groups within your class could explore particular morphemes further by testing out their rules about meaning with additional examples. Find out more  TLRP Research Briefing no. 14 Why morphemes are useful in primary school http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/no14_nunes.pdf The full project is The role of awareness in the teaching and learning of literacy and Numeracy in Key Stage 2 (2001 – 2004) by Prof. Terezina Nunes, Prof. Peter Bryant and Dr. Jane Hurry. The project website is at: http://www.tlrp.org/proj/phase11/phase2h.html Hurry, J. & Parker, M. (2004) The role of awareness in the teaching and learning of literacy and numeracy at key stage 2, TLRP Annual Conference, (Cardiff, November). Available at: http://www.tlrp-archive.org/cgi-bin/search_oai_all.pl?pn=15&no_menu=1&short_menu=1 |
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