In association with
TEACH READING & WRITING
53
occurs throughout government-backed
resources such as Letters and Sounds, as
well as in phonics programmes such as Read
Write Inc. – the 2013National Curriculum
uses the term
common exceptionwords
. The
curriculumrequires children inYear 1 “to read
common exceptionwords, noting unusual
correspondences between spelling and sound
andwhere these occur in theword” (DfE.
2013, p.20). It is important to remember that,
whatever we call them,
words
are not tricky,
only parts of some of themare.
Many Englishwords include grapheme-
phoneme correspondences that children
have notmet by the time they need to read
andwrite them. In this article, wewill focus
onwords thatmay challenge children in Key
Stage 2.
Why are some
words ‘tricky’?
Englishwords derivemainly fromoldGerman
andNorman French, aswell as fromLatin and
a range of other languages, but the spellings
have evolved over the years inweird and
wonderful ways, often due to ignorance
about etymology on the part of printers and
dictionary compilers. It is important that
children understandwhy English spelling can
be so challenging and recognise that adults
also experience difficultieswithmanywords.
In English, almost every phoneme can be
represented inmore than oneway. Look at
the following examples:
/or/ - cork, pour, haul, paw, ball, taught,
thought, score
/r/ - run, write, hurry
/o/ - hot, cough, want
/s/ - sip, cell, pass, scene, psychology, dance
/sh/ - shop, chef, conscience, spacious,
initiative, sugar
Inwords like
diarrhoea
and
yacht
, the grapheme-phoneme
correspondences for some
elements do not appear in any
other words children are likely
tomeet, sowe need to focus
on those parts of theword and
help pupils to learn themas
exceptions. The /o/ sound in
cot is the same sound that is
represented by
ach
in yacht
and the /r/ sound in
rub
is the
same soundwhich is represented
by
rrh
in diarrhoea. The rest of
eachwordwill be familiar fromwords
like
yet, yes, got,
and
diagram, diagonal
and
idea
. The key to learning thewords is to focus
onwhat is easy to learn and then learn the
more difficult bit.
The same,
but different...
HOMOPHONES
The English language hasmanywords that
sound the same but are spelled differently
(
homophones
–meaning same sound, from
theGreek
homos
, same, and
phone
, meaning
sound). Look at thewords below:
wee, bee, ah, ewe, hear, know, sew, watt,
wear, witch, sore, write, putt
We only knowhow to spell some of thewords
if we have some context for them. If you
heard thosewordswithout seeing themand
were asked to spell them, youmight write:
we, be, are, you, here, no, so, what, where,
which, saw, right, put
We need context for words if we are to be
sure to spell themcorrectly. So
read
is the
past tense of the verb to read (I read the
book last week.) and
red
is a colour (a red
shirt). For children learning to read and spell,
homophones can present problems and
causemisunderstandings.
HETERONYMS
Just to confusematters further, English
vocabulary includes several heteronyms:
words that are spelled the same but
pronounced differently and have different
meanings. Consider howyouwould pronounce
record
and howdifferent pronunciations
would give differentmeanings to theword.
Consider the followingwords and howyou
would say themandwhat theymean. What
would you need to know to ensure that you
pronounced themcorrectly and understood
theirmeanings?
read, sow, lead, close, rebel, desert,
minute, present
As children learnmore about homophones
and heteronyms and become confident
about their spellings, theymight go on to
make collections and even create their
own jokes involving a play onwords or
misunderstandings.
Embrace the unusual
Most tricky or common exceptionwords
can be learnt using a combination of phonic
strategies. It is important to emphasise
that all words have grapheme-phoneme
correspondences for every phoneme, even
though some of thesemay be unusual.
For example, in theword
people
the /ee/
TESTFIRST, NOT
AFTERWARDS
USE ASSESSMENT TOHELP
EVERYONE SUCCEED...
Some schools give children the ‘test’
before they see the list of words they
have to learn. This enables children
to have a go at the spellings and to
identify which they already know and
what the tricky bits are in those they
can’t yet spell accurately. They can
then focus their learning on what they
actually need to remember, such as
separate has “a rat” in it, and thumb
ends with a b. By using ‘tests’ in this
way, we can remove the negative
overtones and show that we view
them as part of a learning strategy
instead of an unpleasant event for
some children at the end of the week.
Rather than teachers testing the
whole class, children can work in pairs
or groups to test each other and to
help each other to learn the spellings.
If a test is administered you can
collect each group’s aggregate scores
rather than each individual’s. This
provides a real incentive for groups to
work cooperatively to help everyone
to succeed.
sound is represented by the diagraph /eo/, a
combination of letters that actually occurs
in almost 2000Englishwords (
geography,
stereo, pigeon, yeoman etc
), but hardly ever
to represent an /ee/ sound (
diarrhoea
is a rare
example). Nevertheless, when explaining how
to spell and read theword
people
, you should
point out that /ee/ is represented by eo, while
explaining that this is very unusual.
Allowing children time to explore, discover
and discuss common exceptionwords is
pivotal to their development as spellers.
Providing a range of strategies to help children
remember, and ensuring frequent exposure to
thesewords, will assist in breaking down the
barriers to spelling.
David andAngela are joint authors, with
Wendy Jolliffe, of
Teaching Systematic
Synthetic Phonics in Primary Schools
. David
has also jointlywritten
TeachingGrammar,
Punctuation and Spelling in Primary
Schools
and
Lessons in Teaching Phonics in
Primary Schools
, as well as an app.
Spelling,
Punctuation andGrammar for Children
Count
. All include sections on teaching
trickywords.
