YOU MIGHT THINK IT IS JUST SPELLING HOW DO WORDS WORK

 You might think it is just Spelling

   

Do you know how words work?

I hope you are interested. My new book has so much

information about the advantages of learning Spelling,

from children beginning school - Letters, then moving

on, Words and Language (the grammatical features
involved). The title tells all. There is more to Spelling
than just Spelling words. Words work through
meaning and grammatical forms.
 

You breathed in air, air was in the sky, he was in the

classroom, come in before the you freeze. ‘In’ is
a small word that has lots of subtle meaning shifts. 

The  speller/reader knows about the world. The message 

is that when students know about the world, they know 

about meanings.

 
Consider this phrase. Tom was mad at Joe because he 
stole his lunch. Knowing about pronouns the ‘he’ refers
to Joe and the ‘his’ to Tom. Knowing grammatical forms 

helps develop  conventional spelling, writing and 

meaningful reading.   

 
Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher initially
thought that language must refer to distinct things in the
real world and that philosophy should aim to make it
exact, like science. Later he came to the view that this 

was nonsense. Words cannot be defined precisely they have
fuzzy edges. (Economist September 2023).
 
Idiosyncracies 'fuzzy edges' determining spelling. Passages 

from my new book 

You might think it is just Spelling  
How words work…
 
Because many words and parts of words are
phonetically determined, phonetic awareness is
emphasized in English spelling, but listening only
for sounds in words can create its own problems
for writers and readers. For example, children often
leave out vowel sounds because consonants
mask vowels (business, pronounce bsnes) they
can leave out a consonant because vowels mask
consonants (rank, rak). There are diphthongs,
vowel sounds that glide into one another, ‘ea’ (ear),
‘ay’ (day).
 
There are vowels that have short and long sounds
and there are vowel/vowel (oo) and
vowel/consonant (ow) digraphs.
And look at the different sounds and pronunciations
associated with the letter pattern ough (see page 34). 
Homophones present problems as well; the words
have the same sound but they have different spellings
and meanings. Not to mention multiple-meaning 

words (homographs), which are spelled and sound 

the same–for example, cataract or forge. Noam 

Chomsky and Halle, M (1968) argue that English 

spelling is not an adequate system for representing 

sounds, [it is an]efficient system for representing 

meanings and morphemic relationships.

 laspedagogy.blogspot.com  

 

I am offering copies of my complete book,

not bound, but in page form, to be sent via

e-mail to you. To request copies of my book

Email me: 

liz.simon@laspedagogy.com

 

You need to forward your email address so I can forward all the pages of the book. 

As well, but not obligatory, send X amount of money to a charity (can be of your choosing). Three I suggest are:

 

The smithfamily

https://www.thesmithfamily.com.au/child/donations

 

Unicef Australia

unicef.org.au 

 

Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), an independent international medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters.

https://donations.msf.org.au