Introduction to spelling generalisations transcript

Elaine Stanley:

Let's just start by thinking about where spelling generalisations sit within our SSP instruction, in particular, with respect to developing spelling accuracy for students.

Instruction always begins with learning about letters and sounds to form letter–sound correspondences, following along with a set progression that you're using. Then, at the same time as students are learning these, they're developing phonemic awareness skills in the early stages of instruction so they can actually work with those letters and sounds to spell words.

What students would be doing is segmenting the sounds they can hear in words and then writing the corresponding letter–sound correspondences that they've learned to represent them. This leads to the development of word-level spelling skills.

Once students have learned enough of the code where they begin to know multiple letter patterns that can represent a single sound, this is where our spelling generalisations come in. Spelling generalisations explain to students which letter–sound correspondences to use and when to represent a particular sound in a word, which helps them to make spelling choices as they write, and this improves their spelling accuracy and therefore the overall quality and fluency as well of their writing.

Spelling generalisations also assist students to apply the appropriate sounds as they read, which we’ll also be showing in the lessons we're going to demonstrate today.

Spelling generalisations are included in SSP instruction for one of three main reasons. They help us to explain how the position of a sound within a word influences the letter pattern you are going to use. Some letter patterns, for example, are used in the middle or the start of a word usually, and some are usually used only at the end of a word. The position of a sound in a word assists students to know which one to use and when. We're going to look at an example of that type of spelling generalisation today.

Spelling generalisations can also help to explain how adjacent letters can influence the sound a letter or letter pattern makes. Sometimes the letters around a particular letter or letter pattern will determine the sound that it will make in a word. We'll have a look at some of those.

Spelling generalisations can also help us to introduce multiple sounds for a particular letter pattern. Where a letter pattern has more than one sound that it represents, the spelling generalisation can help students remember those sounds, and also apply them to reading and spelling.

Introducing spelling generalisations into our instruction assists students really to realise that there is order and structure to the spelling system and that English spelling is actually more regular than it's random, which I hope that we will be able to show today as well.

At the Literacy Hub, we've developed the following spelling generalisations document:

https://www.literacyhub.edu.au/search/spelling-generalisations-syllable-division-and-morphology/

This document details all the relevant spelling generalisations to accompany our Literacy Hub phonics progression, but it can be used with any progression that you are using. This document also contains information about rules for syllable division, which we talk more about in part two of the webinar for this topic. It also has information about morphology as well, which we are going to be covering in detail in Topic 7 of our series.

For this presentation, I have taken some snips from the spelling generalisations document to show what it tells us about the spelling generalisations we are focusing on today. We can see for each one the letter pattern that we're talking about, the generalisations for its use, and there's also some background information that students need to have to really understand each spelling generalisation, and there are also some example words.

On this slide we have an example of a spelling generalisation we can use to teach two of the most common ways to spell a long ‘a’ sound in a word. That's ai or ay, and we use the spelling generalisation letter pattern for ‘Sail away’ to help us. This one is an example of how the position of where you hear the sound in the word, the long ‘a’ sound, influences which letter pattern you're going to use to represent it.

We will also look at two examples of spelling generalisations that show how adjacent letters can influence the sound a letter or letter pattern will make. These two are what we call the ‘floss’ rule and also ‘Gentle Cindy’. You can see how these generalisations tell students how they're going to help us to understand how they're applied. If you're not familiar with those, all will become clear when we demonstrate.

Then the other main one we're going to look at today will be ‘Eat bread’, which explains the two most common sounds that the letter pattern ea will make in a word. This spelling generalisation helps students to apply those two most common sounds of ea to reading and spelling. This is an example of using a spelling generalisation to introduce multiple sounds for a letter–sound correspondence.