The following question was posted on Real Spellers at this link:

If you did not get to this document through a Real Spellers post in the first place, I encourage you to go back to this link. There you will find more information about this specific spelling that has already been posted by the Real Spellers community, and perhaps some follow up correspondence regarding this document.

I am regularly asked about how to “use Real Spelling” to teach the spelling of a base. I’ve decided to use Leslie’s question as a prompt to create a document that models steps that can be used to guide the investigating of any question -- including simply trying to understand why a given base uses one grapheme rather than another.

I hope this response to Leslie helps others as well.

Hey Leslie,

This is a really helpful question. I sense that you are actually seeking guidance to develop your understanding along two dimensions: your orthographic knowledge and your instructional practice.

I try use the following question to try to guide my own practice to address both of these dimensions:

What are the most generative concepts about spelling available in this spelling to teach this audience at this time?

This question serves as a reminder that the immediate desire to understand and why the word <first> needs the <ir> digraph rather than <er> may or may not be the most generative feature about this spelling to teach your student. That recognition, in turn, reminds us of a core principle of Structured Word inquiry:

The main target of structured word inquiry instruction is understanding of the spelling system -- not remembering how to spell a specific word.

This principle should not be taken to mean that we never target helping a child fix a correct spelling in their long term memory. But it reminds us that that is never the prime goal.

Just so you know, this response is an “inquiry-led” investigation because I began it with no hypothesis about the answer to your question.

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How does a real speller make sense of the spelling of the word "first"? My student spelled it as "ferst."…

I can't thing of a way to make sense of the spelling, and my student continues to use the sound-it-out method, which fails him miserably. I find the Old English words the most challenging for analysis by morpheme, or by gathering relatives. Any advice would be most appreciated.

Thanks!

Teaching the spelling of a base: What if you can’t explain one of the graphemes?

In order to develop a hypothesis to test, I needed to start a scientific inquiry into the spelling of the word. The “Stuck on a Spelling?” chart guides such investigations for any investigator -- novice or experienced.

1) Meaning: The meaning is straightforward to establish, and I don’t think this was in question for your student.

2) Structure: No likely affixes are apparent, so we must continue with the assumption that we are dealing with a base word.

Note: Just asking if a word is complex, or if it is a base is already offering a student a reinforcement of one of the most foundational concepts of spelling -- Every word is either a base, or a base with something fixed to it. If we can’t find an affix or another base, in a word, that word must be treated as a base.

3) Relatives: Morphology: I can think of a couple of morphological relatives like <firstly> or <firsts> but not too much seems to be going on with this line of inquiry. I could investigate further, but why not move on to any cues from etymology?

Etymology: I find this from the Oxford on my Mac:

ORIGIN Old English fyr(e)st; of Germanic origin, related to Old Norse fyrstr and German Fürst ‘prince,’ from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit prathama,Latin primus, and Greek prōtos .

I do see something in this information that does spark a hypothesis explaining the <ir> grapheme. However, since you indicated that you didn’t find any help with this information, let’s see what we can offer your student based on the orthographic understanding you had at the time of working with your student.

I’ll come back to a clue I see in this information later.

4) Phonology: Since we have determined that we have a base, and we have the correct spelling in front of us to inspect, we can go through the process of identifying each phoneme in the spoken word, and the graphemes that are used to write them.

Note: Remember that you can’t safely identify graphemes until you make a word sum. For example, it’s easy to think that the word <been> uses a <ee> digraph until you consider it’s structure <be + en>. So

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while it may seem incidental whether we investigate grapheme-phoneme correspondences first, or after the looking at the meaning, structure and relatives, it’s actually critical.

Model of a Phonological InquiryTo respond to Leslie’s question, I present a possible dialogue like those that I have with students and teachers all the time. I recommend that you take the role of the student in this discussion and follow instructions from the teacher so that you actually physically announce the phonemes prompted by the teacher.

To represent those phonemes in this written document, I use the standard IPA symbols. The reader may not be familiar with this IPA symbol /ɚ/ for the phoneme represented by the <ir> digraph in <first>. Here is the information I got by referring to the <ir> digraph card in the excellent LEX Grapheme Cards deck.

Teacher / Tutor dialogue with student investigating the grapheme-phoneme correspondences of <first>

The following example discussion occurs with the correct spelling of the base <first> as a reference in front of the teacher and student.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Student responses in bold.)

OK, let’s see if we can identify the phonemes in the base word <first>.

Go ahead and feel just the the initial part of first.

/f/

Do you feel your top teeth on your bottom lip when you say /f/?

Yes.

Good. How do we write /f/ in first?

With an <f>.

Good. Now feel the final part of <first>.

/təә/ [Teachers might recognize this as saying, “tuh”]

Oh, be careful. We don’t say “firstuh”. There is no “uh” at the end. Try saying “first” like normal, and see what you feel your tongue do right at the end.

/fəәrst/, /t/, Oh OK, it’s just /t/

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Good. Now, how do we write that final /t/ in <first>?

With a <t>.

And now, what do you feel just before the /t/ in <first>?

[Student tries out feeling the word] /fəәrst/, /fəәrs/. Is it /s/?

Yes. So how do we write /s/ in <first>?

With an <s>.

Good. Now say <first>.

/fəәrst/

What do you feel right after the /f/ and before the /s/?

/ɚ/

Great, now how did we write the /ɚ/ in first?

Go ahead look at the word written right there (pointing at the correct spelling of the word <first>). How do we write the /ɚ/ in that word.

With an <ir>?

Right, we need the digraph <ir> for the /ɚ/ phoeneme in first.

You had a good idea when you wrote <er> for /ɚ/ because that is definitely one of the ways to write that phoneme.

Actually I suspect there are a few other ways to write /ɚ/ as well. I’m sure there’s a good reason for needing the <ir>, but

I’m not actually sure why right now. We’ll have to look into that later.

For now, let’s try something else. Listen carefully to how I spell out <first>. I’m going to spell each grapheme in time as I tap my finger of one hand on my palm of the other like this…

“f ir s t”

Now you try it.

“f ir s t”

Good. See that when you tap out the graphemes like that you have to say the <ir> together quickly? That way each grapheme gets the same amount of time when you spell out the base.

[Note: The next part of this investigation draws from an excellent Real Spelling resource from 2005 called “The Real Orthographic Memory” that I have pasted on at the last page of this document.

Now let’s write a few word sums with the base <first>. Earlier, we only thought of a couple suffixes we could add to this base. Let’s see if the Word Searcher can find some more.

Search Results for "first"(5 matches)

firstfirstsfirstlyfirstbornheadfirst

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There aren’t many, but there are a couple of compounds we hand’t thought of. Which word sum would you like to make first?

Um, how about <firstly>.

OK, go a head and spell out the base and name the graphemes as you write them. And when you do, have a go at saying and writing the <ir> together like you just spelled them out…

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Reflection on this example inquiry

At this point the reader can follow the steps of the Real Spelling document on the final page of this pdf with steps for fixing a spelling in the mind of a learner. Notice by following these steps the student will spell-out and write out the graphemes of the base <first> over and over in the context of real words.

You may notice that I’ve made some of my own modifications to how I use this document. I emphasize announcing and spelling out the graphemes in a way that is not highlighted in this Real Spelling resource.

Teachers should feel free to make any modification they desire, as long as the spelling system is accurately represented. However, I do suggest that to really fix a spelling in a learners’ memory, it is important that the student do the following:

(1) Name the letters as they write them;

(2) Signal morphological groups in how they write and spell-out word sums.

In addition, I recommend teachers take on the challenge of spelling-out and writing-out the graphemic structure in the base. See the information and resources at this page on “spelling-out word structure. This page has more on “spelling-out” s an assessment tool as well.

What next?

Some follow up activities might include creating a chart to collect ways of writing /ɚ/. How many words with <ir> and <er> digraphs can the class find? What are some other common graphemes for this phoneme?

See the image above from a blog post from Skot Caldwell’s Grade 1 class for an example classroom generated data bank of graphemes for a phoneme. In this case, Skot’s students are looking for ways to write the “long e” phoneme. Why note create similar data bank of graphemes for /ɚ/?

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Some additional spelling concepts available to teach from this investigation and resources to help you...

Compound words and more digraphs The compound words that came up in my Word Searcher search provide additional learning opportunities. Notice that if you take on the practice I recommend of announcing graphemes within bases, you will need to guide the learner to name and write out the <or> digraph in <born> and the <ea> in <head>. This gives us a chance to practice announcing digraphs in a base in time with this “tapping out” technique. While the <ea> is likely a familiar digraph, it’s just possible the student (or teacher) had not considered the <or> digraph until faced with having to spell-out a base in graphemes.

Word sum and matrix making (Mini-Matrix Maker & Word Microscope):At Neil Ramsden’s spelling page, you can find links not only to the Word Searcher, but also to two computer resources for constructing matrices, and suffixing convention tools. Depending on the interest of the student, creating a little matrix by typing word sums on the family identified by the Word Searcher could help fix this spelling and the other concepts in the learner’s mind.

LEX grapheme cards:If you don’t have your own copy of Gina Cooke’s LEX grapheme cards, this is one of those times it’s great to have them handy.

Script and the <-ly> suffix:I find the <-ly> suffix a particularly pleasurable one for students to write and name quickly. The word <firstly>

offers an opportunity to build on that structure. Depending on the needs of the student with regard with script, I might very soon integrate a script lesson building words with the <-ly> suffix.

See the old introductory document from Wordworks at this link on integrating Real Script into instruction. Even better, go investigate the new Real Script resource at Real Spelling!

What about the question about understanding <ir> vs. <er>?

You may have noticed that this model lesson sparked by the above question has not even answered the original question!

Although I am confident that that we have actually encountered at least etymological cues to explain the use of <ir> in this word, this is a good time to return to the guiding question for instruction:

What are the most generative concepts about spelling available in this spelling to teach this audience at this time?

Again, this question reminds us that the main concern is not actually the accurate spelling of the word <first>. Instead, I am always on the lookout for the most important underlying concepts that I can help a student understand by means of investigating a word.

Given that we didn’t find the reason for the <ir>, what did we learn through this process?

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What did we learn?

Going through the process of investigating the spelling ensured that we encountered and practiced many rich spelling concepts -- not the least of which was practicing the steps of a spelling investigation. We also went through the process of fixing the correct spelling of this word in the student’s mind.

Here are just some essential orthographic concepts were at least implied by this example investigation even though we did not find the answer to the original question.

• Graphemes are single letters or , two- or three-letter combinations that represent a phoneme.

• Most graphemes can represent more than one phoneme.

• Most phonemes can be represented by more than one grapheme.

• Graphemes can only occur within a base.

• <ir> and <er> are possible digraphs for /ɚ/.

• Every word is either a base, or a base with something fixed to it.

• Compound words are words with more than one base.

• Practice identifying phonemes by feeling them in words.

• The terms initial and final for discussing position of phonemes or graphemes within a morpheme.

Depending on the individual student or class, the teacher could choose to use the spelling <first> to bring even more explicit attention to any of those or other concepts.

While we don’t yet know how to help ths student with understanding why this word needs the <ir> digraph rather than the <er> digraph he hypothesized, the student can be congratulated for choosing a possible digraph for the phoneme he needed. And the the valuable, but lowest order goal of helping the child spell <first> accurately has been achieved by working through this lesson.

What next?

Since we didn’t find an understanding of our original question, we can add it to our “Wonder Wall” for future consideration. See an example of such a classroom tool on the next page from Craig Irvine’s Grade 3/4 class in a public school in Melbourne.

I encourage schools that are taking on this work to create not only classroom “Wonder Walls” like Craig’s, but also a Wonder Wall in the staff room.

This way, once a class has had a go at a question without finding the conclusion they were looking for, they can bring their question to a common area for other teachers to see. It is quite possible that another teacher may have encountered this question.

And when teachers and students remain curious but no answer presents itself, they can always post their questions to the world-wide community of learners that wonder the halls of Real Spellers looking for interesting questions to address.

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A hypothesis to explain the <ir> in <first>And finally here is my hypothesis to Leslie’s question based on the etymological information already cited:

ORIGIN Old English fyr(e)st; of Germanic origin, related to Old Norse fyrstr and German Fürst ‘prince,’ from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit prathama,Latin primus, and Greek prōtos .

My Oxford points to the Old Norse “fyster” and the Latin “primus”. These historical relatives offer good reasons for the letter <i> to surface in the grapheme choice for the spelling of <first>. The <y> and <i> share a well-established connection. Also, it makes sense that the <i> helps mark the spelling-meaning connection between the Latin root ‘primus’ and the English base <first>.

Please share any challenges to this hypothesis or additional observations at this link on Real Spellers.

Notice, however, that failing to see this etymological clue does not keep a teacher from offering a great deal by investigating the spelling of <first>.

And let me leave the reader with one last question to consider, and perhaps respond to on Real Spellers..

Is there anything that the “sound-it-out” approach offers that is lost from this instructional example?

Personally, I see no loss, but so much to gain.

Pete Bowers

May, 23, 201

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Curiosity Wall

Morpheme Sticky Note

Chart

Big Suffix Checker

Real Spelling

Tool Box 2 Indexes

Curiosity WallThis “Word Lab” wall from Craig Irvine’s Grade 3/4 class marks the on-going learning. It includes a growing bank of morphemes, a “Big Suffix Checker, Indexes of the Real Spelling Tool Box 2 Kits, and last, but not least a “curiosity wall”. I’ve often referred to this idea of a “wonder wall” where we can see a growing pile of questions that a class has encountered for future investigation.

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