I just listened to a Reading League podcast with Dr. David Kilpatrick. Dr. Kilpatrick has helped translate Dr. Linnea Ehri’s excellent research on orthographic mapping, which is the process of automatic word recognition, into classroom practice. He has written two great books, Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, and Equipped for Reading Success.
As I listened to Dr. Kilpatrick’s explanation on how he would explain the spelling of <yacht> to a student, he used the words “tricky parts” to refer to the <ch> in the word.
As part of my learning journey to uncover how our spelling system really works through Structured Word Inquiry (Bowers, 2010), I once again reflected on how closely SWI connects to the research on orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping research has demonstrated that for words to be recognized automatically, the graphemes (letter or letter strings that represent phonemes) must be bonded to the phonemes (unit of sound) and the meaning in memory. It may take anywhere from 1 to over 20 exposures for the word to move from having to be decoded to being instantly recognized.
Structured Word Inquiry looks at a word and asks four questions:
- What is the meaning?
- What are the relatives?
- What is the structure?
- What are the sounds that matter?
The following is an inquiry into the word <yacht>:
An investigation of the word shows that the <ch> in the word <yacht> is an etymological marker grapheme that connects the spelling to its Germanic origins. It has been my experience that being able to share the real reason behind a spelling adds another layer of meaning that can be further explored during question 4 through grapheme/phoneme matching.
This would just be the initial inquiry into the word. Exposures can be continued through word-sums, spelling-out-loud, writing-out-loud and using the word in short student-created texts.