A Few Words About Words

At The Literacy Tree we ponder about words and their origins a fair amount – more than some people would say was healthy, to be fair. We love a fact about a piece of language, such as how a word was invented and what its origins – or etymology - might be.  The other day we were speculating on words ending with the suffix ‘ic’. We chatted about a few (heroic, fantastic, comic, dramatic) before trying to identify the common factor to identify any historic (!) meaning of the group. After trying a number of words out in context, we realised quite quickly that many of the words must be to do with a characteristic of someone. However this did not seem true of every word and so of course we finally resorted to the trusty Google.  After searching we discovered that the word ‘phonic’ comes from the ancient Greek word for ‘sound’. This then started another conversation about symbols representing sounds, as apparently the Greeks were the first to invent an alphabet to represent the sounds in their language. It is therefore fitting that in English we use the word ‘phonics’ to mean the teaching of the letter-sound relationships for reading, and the sound-letter relationships for spelling.

Not so long ago, English spelling was not set in stone as it is now; words were spelt to reflect their language of origin. A single sound could be spelt a multitude of ways. For example, the /c/ sound is spelt ‘ch’ when it is a word that is derived from a Greek word, eg ‘chaos’ whereas the /sh/ sound is spelt with a ‘ch’ when it has a French derivative, such as machine. Whilst these examples might not create the most common spellings for children, we attach importance to our spelling patterns and since the arrival of the dictionary, these have become agreed and have not changed very much since.

 So why do we like finding these nuggets out? In a nutshell, we like a story – something to stick the learning to. This is often our approach to planning teaching sequences, but lately we’ve been thinking more about how we need it for our phonics teaching too. A while back, in October 2012, we blogged about the need to ‘Let’s Give Phonics a Context’. http://theliteracytree.co.uk/blog/posts/Lets-Give-Phonics-a-Context The need for this hasn’t gone away. In fact we are seeing more of a need now, for schools to support their daily systematic synthetic phonics teaching a boost through making links with real opportunities for application, through using real books to ensure children are getting the opportunity to use the reading skills they have been taught. Because, here is the thing – words do not stand up by themselves. Or parts of words. Time and time again, we see word lists categorised by spelling patterns, phonemes and graphemes as well as usefulness, such as connectives, adverbs and adjectives. All of these are ‘useful’ to a point – but the real power of language comes when we start to find the story and we let the words tell a story.