Alfabetico can tailor workshops to meet the Professional Development needs of your staff
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Navigating the Orthographic Structures of English – How did we end up with these spellings?
A language’s Orthography is made up of three elements – Etymology, Morphology, and Phonology.
English language has reliable structures that many of us are not aware of. Even as educators, we simply ‘Don’t know what we don’t know’. But like our students, we need to continue our own learning journeys.
Learning about the deeper structures of English Orthography, using the same rigorous inquiry methods used within any scientific discipline, enables us to convey these regular structures to our students so that they, too, gain a deeper understanding; without exception!
orth + o + graph + y –> orthography
The above word sum is a powerful scientific tool that orthographers’ use to gain a greater understanding of a word’s meaning, structure, relatives, and pronunciation.
A Journey to Present Day English
Like a tree, the structures, or ‘roots’, of English are not always immediately visible to us at the surface, or word level ( for more information, see our blog post on the word <two>).
We need to be aware of the relationship between etymology (a word’s history), its morphology (its structure – how it’s built), and its phonology (the parts of the pronunciation that enable us to construct meaning). In this way, we can delve deeper into a structure’s history to truly uncover the journey a particular spelling has undergone; to arrive at its Present Day English (PDE) form.
Continuing the Journey
With over a million words in the English language, we will never know them all. However, by engaging in continued professional development, we, as educators, can learn the regular patterns that are present in English language, and share them with our students for a greater understanding of the ‘big picture’.
Looking for More Resources?
‘This language, a river’ by K. Aaron Smith and Susan M. Kim, is a must read book for those interested in expanding their knowledge of the English Language.
This Language, A River is an introduction to the history of English that recognizes multiple varieties of the language in both current and historical contexts. Developed over years of undergraduate teaching, the book helps students both to grasp traditional histories of English and to extend and complicate those histories.
Stay in touch and share your own realisations and revelations of the wondrous nature of the English language.