Teaching Spelling by Westwood Peter

Author:Westwood, Peter [Westwood, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Word families

Word families are groups of words that share common visual, phonologic or morphemic features. Basal spelling programmes usually contain many such groupings of words— underpinned by the belief that working with these word families helps children learn important letter sequences that commonly occur. Davis (2013) states that word families help to establish an awareness of spelling structures and letter sequences that can generalize to the spelling of thousands of other words.

Studying a specific word family usually involves reading the words aloud, noting similarities and differences, underlining or colour-coding the important letter string, writing the words from memory, and using the words in sentences. It is common practice then to display a large-print version of the word family on a wall-chart in the classroom, so that it can be revisited occasionally and, most importantly, can serve as a reference when children are engaged in writing.

Here is an example of a small word family for establishing the letter string /ean/ as a rhyme and a mental orthographic image:

bean,

lean

mean

clean

I mean, this bean is lean and clean!

Based on children’s age and level of spelling development, teachers would need to decide whether to include the less common words dean, glean, wean.

Having read and studied the /ean/ words teachers might, on a different day, ask: ‘Can we add –ing to any of these words and still make a real word?’ ‘Can we add –ed?’ ‘Can we add –est?’ On another occasion, the teacher might include this group of words within a Word Sort, together with the words keen, preen, scene, screen, been, teen, so that the students can learn that other letter groups can also be used to represent the sound unit /ean/.

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