Word study making words

Many students find word study to be one of the most enjoyable components of balanced literacy instruction. Teachers find it to be one of the most powerful. That’s because reading ability dramatically improves as students use meaningful games and activities to discover:

1. Letters and the sounds they make
2. How to pick out root words, and how suffixes and prefixes can change the meaning
3. Spelling involves finding patterns
4. How to get clues to word meaning and pronunciation by examining the parts of a word.

But word study isn’t all fun and games.  It actually involves problem solving in the form of developing hypotheses, searching for patterns, predicting outcomes, and experimenting to find out if they’re right.  Using word study activities, students compare new words to words they already know and look for similarities.

Why is Word Study Important?

In order to become fully literate, students must have the ability to accurately recognize words.  They also have to adequately use written words to convey meaning.  Because word study is based on phonics spelling and vocabulary, it’s a way for students to manipulate and fully examine words.

At once they do, students realize that words are powerful things.  When they learn how words work they’re on their way to becoming fully literate individuals. Learning phonics, sight words, decoding, spelling patterns, and word meanings, means understanding the basics of written words. From there they can communicate and construct meaning.   After all, that’s what language is all about.

Fortunately, educators have come to realize that rote drill and practice isn’t the most efficient way to master a reading or writing skill.  Students need the opportunity to think critically and manipulate words and their concepts.  That way they can generalize words based on spelling or other commonalities.  Grasping spelling, word recognition, and vocabulary goes beyond memorizing a few rules.  The best way to become proficient in words and their features is to have plenty of opportunities to examine them in different contexts.

The Purpose of Word Study

As a component of balanced literacy, word study achieves two goals; first to help students become fluent readers with a strong vocabulary, and secondly, to give students the opportunity to fully explore and manipulate words.

• Word study isn’t about memorizing spelling words but about understanding spelling patterns.
• It isn’t about manipulating a random group of words but can compare words that are phonetically similar.
• It isn’t just another fun activity but is a purposeful look at word analysis.

Word Study Activities

When planning word study lessons, teachers can choose from a variety of activities to improve spelling, word recognition and vocabulary.  Students tend to enjoy working with words and are eager to get word “games.”  Here a just a few of them…

Word Study Activity 1: Word Searches

In word searches students take a group of word categories and “search” for examples of words in those categories by combing through magazines, newspapers, books, or textbooks.  They write down the words they find.

Word Study Activity 2: Pattern Sorting

Pattern sorting is an activity that teaches students to categorize words.  The categories can be based on the way particular sounds are expressed in a word.  Pattern sorting is great for looking at vowel patterns, contractions, and silent letters.

Word Study Activity 3: Proofreading

Proofreading is one of those “must have” skills in order to be optimally successful in school.  Word study lessons involving proofreading help students learn to develop an eye for how a written word should look.  They learn to know if a word “looks right” when spelled out.

Using word study lessons to round out a balanced literacy program promises a much greater chance of retaining word meanings and making sense of spelling rules.

Thank goodness, literacy has moved beyond writing a list of words five times each to learn to spell.  Or decoding words by simply “sounding them out.”  Now word study makes exploring the various aspects of the English language much more meaningful and enjoyable.

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Welcome to day 1 of Teaching Spelling through Word Study. To see all of the posts in this series, please click HERE or on the image above. If you’ve read many of my posts, you know I love the word study approach. It’s very much a part of the two FREE reading curricula that I write: Reading the Alphabet and Phonics by The Book.  So what exactly is Word Study?  Put on your seat belts and buckle up, because here we go…

Traditional Spelling

First, I wanted to drudge up what you probably already know about spelling.  Maybe it’s how you experienced spelling as a child.  Rote memorization. The equation looks something like this:

SEE Word + WRITE Word = MEMORIZE Word

If we see the word a lot + write (or copy) the word a lot, then the string of letters will stick in our brain.  The typical spelling list will look something like this: made, years, know, please, etc.  The words chosen for these lists are mostly high frequency words that are unrelated to one another in any way.

We also have our lists of rules: “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking” or “the silent e makes the vowel say its name”.  But, it doesn’t take much time before we discover that these rules have many, many exceptions.

With traditional spelling, spelling can become rather dull and boring for the student (and teacher). Students are mostly passive learners; simply empty containers to fill.  Students often memorize the words for the test, but forget them after they’ve scored their 100’s.

Rote memorization * Unrelated word lists * Lists of rules * Many exceptions * Dull and boring * Passive * Forgettable

Now, contrast traditional spelling with…

The Word Study Approach

Word Study operates under a different paradigm.  It is “based on the belief that most words do follow spelling generalizations” or patterns. (Johnston) As a matter of fact, studies show 84 percent of English words are mostly predictable!  (Moats) Instead of memorizing lists of unrelated words, students are given word lists that are centered around a specific pattern, like word families. Through studying these patterns, students can begin to “understand how words are built and apply this knowledge” in their reading and spellings.  (www.spellingscholar.com)

Students are given word sorts and asked to be active learners as they compare, contrast, sort/manipulate, and classify the words.  They are also encouraged to use and apply the word generalizations when they read and write. (Templeton & Pikulski)  Peter Johnston says is best in his book Choice Words, “…there are hidden costs in telling people things.  If students can figure something out for themselves, explicitly providing the information preempts the students’ opportunity to build a sense of agency and independence.”

Based on the patterned word lists, students begin to form generalizations that sound something like: “Almost every time I see a and i together, it makes the long a sound.  And I notice that the a-i is either at the beginning or in the middle of the word.”  This generalization can help the student read and spell unknown words that share the same ai pattern.

And a very important difference between traditional spelling and word study: word patterns are chosen specific to the spelling development of the child. This means if the child is ready for long vowel patterns, these are the patterns he studies.

Generalizations * Patterns * Active Learners * Compare * Contrast * Sort * Classify * Apply * Specific for Child

A Little Theory Behind Word Study

Why are Word Patterns Important for Learning to Spell (and Read)?

I love how Pat Cunningham puts it in her book Phonics They Use.  “The brain…is not a rule applier but a pattern decoder.  While we look at single letters, we are looking at them and considering all the letter patterns we know.  Successfully decoding (or encoding) a word occurs when the brain recognizes a familiar spelling pattern…or searches through its store of words with similar patterns.” (pg. 186, 188)

Applied Knowledge of Words

“Word study teaches children to focus on patterns and meaning chunks.  In a word study program, children learn to apply their knowledge to a greater number of words than they could learn by memorizing traditional spelling lists.” (Mattmann & Cowan)

How many more words? Well, let’s say that a child has 20 spelling words a week.  Now multiply that by 36 weeks for 10 years.  Hmmm, 7200 words…that is, if he can memorize them all perfectly.  But, the average vocabulary of a high school student is around 75,000 words!  7200 is only 10%! (Johnston)  Let’s take the word study approach. The study of the a_e pattern alone can help students learn to spell and read over 100 words (off the top of my head)!

Word Study Resources:

I could go on and on and on…really…there are whole entire books written on this one subject. If you’re a ” literacy nerd” like me, you may enjoy these books, websites, and articles.

• 10 Days of Teaching Spelling Through Word Study {from This Reading Mama}
• Words Their Way-Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston
• Choice Words -Peter Johnston
• Phonics They Use-Pat Cunningham
• A More Effective Way to Teach Spelling-Mattmann & Cowan
• Building the Foundations of Literacy-Templeton & Pikulski
• How Spelling Supports Reading-Moat
• How Words Cast Their Spell-Joshi, Treiman, Carreker, and Moats
• Questions Teachers Ask About Spelling-Templeton & Morris (Reading Research Quarterly)
• Spelling Scholar– FAQ
• Why Do They Get it on Friday and Misspell it on Monday?– Gill & Scharer (Language Arts)
• For even more articles, visit here.

And don’t forget to hop around on the hopscotch board and visit the other amazing bloggers at iHomeschool Network and enter the Pin to Win Giveaway!

~Becky