Archive for category: Reading and Spelling Rules

What is the Schwa?

Now that students have learned about multiple syllable words and syllable division with a variety of endings, they will be introduced to the ‘schwa’. The schwa is a lightly pronounced unaccented vowel sound that sounds like /u/ rather than the vowel saying its name or sound, and the ‘schwa’ is represented by an upside down ‘e’ (ə). The ‘schwa’ is a concept of our language that can be overlooked despite its prevalence in the English language.

Take for instance the word, ‘banana’; there are three of the same vowel in this word, but only one is actually pronounced with its sound – the other two are unaccented syllables, allowing the ‘schwa’ to occur (accented syllables will never be said with a schwa in English). Occasionally, the schwa can also be on a vowel digraph. An example of this would be in the word ‘captain’; if we said this word phonetically, the ‘ai’ in it would make a long /a/ sound, but we actually read it with an /ə/ sound.

History of the Schwa

Where does the ‘schwa’ come from? The actual concept wasn’t coined as a ‘schwa’ until the late 1800’s by German phonologists and was borrowed from the Hebrew words “shva”, but the unstressed vowel sound goes back even further to Old English as well as languages of different families such as Albanian, Caucasian and Uralic languages, Hindi, Korean, Romance languages, Slavic languages, and many more all throughout the world!

There is always one stressed vowel within a multi-syllable word, so the unstressed vowel (or syllable) began to take on a consistent, unaccented sound /u/. English is a stress-timed language (opposite of a syllable-timed language, like Spanish), which means the rhythmic impression is based on the regular timing of stress peaks, not syllables. This style of English goes all the way back to the 9th century and is the same style that we use today.

The schwa is incredibly important for world languages in general by helping to emphasize the accented syllable. It might be hard to believe, but this sound is actually the most used sound in the entire English language.

How We Learn the Schwa

To help students understand the schwa and how to identify it within words, we draw the student’s attention to it with an example word, like ‘banana’ as it is easy to identify the schwa in this word. A clinician will write out the word and have the student divide it into syllables. Then, they ask them to identify the accent, which will play fair (in other words, it will say its expected sound).

Next, the clinician will draw the student’s attention to the unaccented syllables and identify the sound they are making as the schwa sound. It can be fun to have the student try the word without a schwa on the first and last syllable (e.g. bānanā). Next, the student will decode several words with the schwa sound repeating this process.

Step 1: Syllable Division

ba | na | na

Step 2: Identify Accent

ba | nà | na

Step 3: Draw Attention to Unaccented Syllables with Schwa Sound

bə | nà | nə

It may also be helpful to look up a few words in the dictionary to demonstrate how the schwa is represented so they can sound out unknown words. For example: captain (ˈkap tən), banana (bəˈna nə), abandon (əˈban dən). It will not be hard to find as it is in the majority of English words!

‘-S/ES’ Endings

The English language has a number of inflectional endings, which are groups of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning. They have spelling and pronunciation rules that are helpful for a developing reader to know. The third ending we teach is the ‘s/es’ ending, which is used to make words plural. There are some words with irregular plurals such as “mouse/mice” or “sheep/sheep.” For the purposes of reading and spelling remediation, we do not spend time teaching these. It is more important for our students to know about common pluralization.

History of the ‘-S/ES’ Ending

English has lost many of its inflectional endings over its long history, but the common plural ending for nouns has survived since Old English. The ‘-S/ES’ ending derives from the masculine ending ‘-as’, as in cyningas “kings”.

We can be thankful for this adoption from Old English, otherwise we would have many more irregular plurals from the ancient Germanic language. If you think ‘mice’ is weird, imagine if more than one goat was a bunch of ‘gat’, or more than one oak tree was a field of ‘ack’. In order to properly discuss a plural form of any of these nouns, you would have needed to know the exact word for it rather than just adding on the handy ‘-S/ES’ ending.

Rules of the ‘-S/ES’ Ending

The ‘s’ ending is quite different from the other endings covered so far because it does not contain a vowel. This makes adding the ending less complicated. For the vast majority of words, simply add the letter ‘s’ to change from singular to plural. There are just two situations that require something different.

First, if the base word ends in consonant+‘y,’ change ‘y’ to ‘i’ and add ‘es’ (copy/copies). The other part of this spelling rule relates to the ‘s’ sound. If the base word ends in the letters ‘s,’ ‘z,’ ‘x,’ ‘sh,’ or ‘ch,’ the ending ‘es’ must be used (fuss/fusses, bench/benches). To make the plural sound distinct from the singular base word, this adds another syllable which sounds like /iz/.

Examples of ‘-S/ES’ Endings

In general, simply add ‘s’

walk to walks

If the base word ends in ‘e,’ add ‘s’

save to saves

If the vowel says its sound and there is a single consonant after, add ‘s’

hop to hops

If the base word ends in vowel+’y,’ add ‘s’

play to plays

If the base word ends in consonant+’y,’ change ‘y’ to ‘i’ and add ‘es’

cry to cries

If the base word ends in S, Z, X, SH, or CH, add ‘es.’ This adds a syllable and is pronounced /iz/.

misses, fizzes, foxes, brushes, lunches.

‘-ED’ Endings

The English language has a number of inflectional endings- these endings are groups of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning, or more specifically, assign it a particular grammatical property. They have spelling and pronunciation rules that are helpful for a developing reader to know. The first ending we teach is the ‘ed’ ending, which is used to make most verbs past tense.

The Nuances of ‘-ED’ Endings

Reading and Speaking

It is important for reading students to know that this syllable does not often sound the way it looks. Rather than saying /ed/, the ‘ed’ ending makes the sound /t/ as in “walked,” /d/ as in “saved,” or /id/ as in “lifted.” Our language also has several irregular verbs, which do not change to past tense by merely adding an ending; they change to a different word altogether. For example, the word “run” doesn’t become “runned.” It changes to “ran.” Most native English speakers will make these changes automatically when speaking.

Spelling

Our students learn that in order to correctly spell past-tense verbs with this ending, they need to pay close attention to the spelling of the base word. There are two challenging parts of the ‘-ED’ ending to remember: when to double a consonant and what to do if a base word ends in ‘y.’

The final consonant of a word is doubled if the vowel in the base word says its sound (short vowel sound) and is followed by a single consonant (rub/rubbed). The doubling does not occur, for example, when the vowel in the base word is saying its name (long vowel sound) and is followed by a single consonant (need/needed or save/saved).

How do you make a verb ending in ‘y’ past tense? If the base word ends in ‘y,’ look at the letter before ‘y.’ A base word ending with a vowel before the ‘y’ is changed to past tense simply by adding ‘ed’ (employ/employed). A base word that ends with a consonant before the ‘y’ needs to change ‘y’ to ‘i’ before adding ‘ed’ (fry/fried).

Examples of Spelling Different ‘-ED’ Endings

In general, just add ‘ed,’

walk to walked

If the base word ends in ‘e,’ add only ‘d’

save to saved

If the vowel says its sound and there is a single consonant after, double the consonant

hop to hopped (compare to hoped)

If the base word ends in vowel+’y,’ add ‘ed’

play to played

If the base word ends in consonant+’y,’ change ‘y’ to ‘i’ and add ‘ed’

cry to cried

Once students learn about multiple syllable words, how to break them down into individual syllables, and how open and closed syllables affect the word, they can then move on to learning about different endings that add an extra syllable.

Before they jump into endings that change the tense of a word, they learn about a very common ending that can only be understood with a base knowledge of multiple syllables:  the -le ending. Being able to understand the nuances of this ending will help students when decoding or spelling words with this ending.

Tutor: “Let’s talk about another ending we have in multisyllable words. What would ‘-le’ say at the end of a word?”

Student: “Lee.”

Tutor: “You would think so, but we already have an ending for /lee/ ‘ly.’ How about in this word.” The tutor writes out the word ‘table.’

Student: “/tay-bull/”

Tutor: “Perfect! This ‘le’ ending is a rule breaker. Instead of saying /lee/ it will say /ul/. Also it doesn’t follow the rules for syllable division. The ‘le’ will actually grab another consonant that’s in front of it. So when we divide ta/ble the le is taking the b with it. That means the first syllable is open and the vowel is saying its name.”

“What about the word puddle? Is the first syllable vowel saying its name or sound?”

Student: “/p/…/u/  its sound!”

Tutor: “Right you are. Because we want the vowel to say its sound, and because the “le” breaks the rules and takes a consonant, we get to double up the ‘d’ in puddle.”

“Now -le can only grab specific consonants.”

The tutor makes the “le card” with: ble, cle, dle, fle, gle, kle, ple, sle, tle, zle

“Here’s the catch.”

Student: “There’s always a catch!”

Tutor: “I know. The catch is there are three exceptions to the “-le” ending. They are ‘m, n, and v.’ With these letters instead of ‘le’ we are going to use ‘el’. So I will put mel, nel, vel on your card at the bottom. Even though we switched the letters, they will still say /ul/, as in “ the camel travels through the tunnel.” Pretty cool right?”

Student: “I guess…”

Tutor: “Don’t forget, we can double the consonant to make a closed syllable so the vowel will say its sound.”

To finish up the ‘blockers’ rules, we teach students about the double ff, ll, ss rule (sometimes referred to as the ‘Floss Rule’).  Rather than adding a different consonant to block the vowel, we double the end consonant, and, strangely, for only the letters ‘l’, ‘f’, and ‘s’.   Any word that has a short vowel sound (vowel saying it’s sound) and ends with one of these letters will need that letter to be doubled for the same reason as all of our other blocker rules; this ‘protects’ the vowel from changing when a tense is changed or endings are added to the word.

“The last blocker rule we will learn is somewhat different from the others.  We will now talk about doubling the final consonant in words.  The funny thing is that we don’t do this consistently with all consonants.  The only ones that it works for consistently are L, F and S.  Therefore, we will call this the double ll, double ff, double ss rule.  Can you think of any words that use these double consonants at the end?”

Student: “Bill, stuff and grass.”

Tutor: “Right!  Many common words use these endings, but we don’t say the sound twice, do we?  So, we need to have some way of predicting when to double.  Now the other rules we’ve learned had 2 parts, but since there are 3 consonants that we double, there will be 3 parts to this rule.”

Student: “I am intrigued beyond belief, please tell me more.”

Tutor: “Now, whenever we have a vowel saying its sound, and a (/l/), a (/f/) or a (/s/) come right after the vowel AND that is the last sound in the word, we double the L, F, or S.  Why do you think we do that?”

Student: “In case we add an ending like –ed?”

Tutor: “You’re right!  Just as with –tch and –ck, we are doubling here to protect the vowel just in case we add an ending like –ed later on.  That ending doesn’t have to be there though, because we use the double consonant regardless.  Now let’s look at some words that use ll/ff/ss.”