Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Maggie.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: And I'm Nicole. Welcome to the DAC Dyslexia and Coffee Podcast. We are so happy you could join us. We are both moms and dyslexia interventionists who want to talk about our students and children. What dyslexia is, how it affects our kids, strategies to help and topics related to other learning disabilities will also be covered in this podcast. Parents are not alone, and we want to give a voice to the concerns and struggles we are all having. This is a safe place to learn more about how to help our children grow and succeed in school, in the world.
Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the conversation.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Hi, everybody. So it is time for the concept of the week. The concept of the week is how we like to start each episode. That is our opportunity as practitioners to bring y'all into an intervention session and talk about all the concepts we would be teaching about with our students. Students. So today's concept of the week is actually a review.
So we're going to review encoding. Encoding is the process of using sound and letter relationships to form words.
In other words, it's the process of.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Spelling, which, weirdly enough, is our topic today. Oh, see what we did there? Yeah. Spelling. Why spelling? Spelling so important?
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Yeah. So we believe it or not get asked this question a lot.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Why do we spend so much time on spelling? Why is it even important? So we thought time to address that. So many reasons. One, improved reading. Spelling reinforces sound and letter patterns.
Words are read faster when we know how to spell them.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: It also improves our writing.
It allows students to use a greater variety of vocabulary words, which is very important.
Frees cognitive load to focus on content of writing instead of using that cognitive load to spell with.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Right. So it becomes more fluent. As a writer, you're not stuck on every single word. How do I spell that word? Also improves our vocabulary. The knowledge of morphology. That's that meaning piece.
It helps support spelling and it deepens the understanding of the words that we use.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Semantic knowledge. What is that, Maggie?
[00:02:35] Speaker A: So semantic knowledge is how we use our words. Right. So might have, like, grammatical impact on words.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Also, spelling is necessary for daily communication. How do you write a note to somebody if you cannot spell something? Right.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: Don't forget to pick up whatever it is at the grocery store. Right.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: Even a text message or an email.
Still, to be clear. Right.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Most of the time, we need to spell at least most of our words correctly.
You know, another piece of this is, although poor spellers might be very intelligent, spelling is often Used to judge somebody's education and intelligence.
Sadly, that is true.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. Which is so silly to me.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: It absolutely is. But it is.
That is an ever present force. Right.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Correct.
So our first myth is English is unpredictable.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Yes.
This myth comes to you courtesy of the balanced literacy world.
There was a really de Emphasized importance of spelling.
Entire generations of kids were taught, well, English is so unpredictable, and it's such a weird language.
So we don't really need to focus that much on spelling. That is false. It is a fact that 50% of common English words can be spelled only using phoneme and grapheme correspondence. So just understanding the relationships between the phonemes, the sounds and the graphemes, the letters.
50% of words.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: 36% more of words can be spelled with only one error, which means they don't completely follow the grapheme foaming correspondence, but they can for most of the word.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Which.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: The important part of that is if we've got the first part of the word and the first phoneme correct and that first vowel sound at least correct, that's when something like spellcheck can pick that word up and correct that. And it is also the point at which most people could decode that word and at least have the understanding of what that person is trying to spell.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: 10% more words can be spelled if we understand the meaning, the morphology or the etymology, which means where does that word come from?
So only 4%, if we're adding all those things up. So only 4% of English words are truly irregular.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: So that whole idea, which is really not that many.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Exactly. That whole idea of English is so weird. Right. It's just not true. It's not true.
What is true, though, is that English is a language that's derived from many different languages. So that means it does contain a variety of spelling patterns. So there have been efforts historically to simplify the spelling.
When we talked a little bit about that etymology piece before. Right. Where does the word come from? If anybody's ever watched, like, the big time spelling bees, they could be kind of fun to watch sometimes. Really impressive.
Very impressive.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Yes.
Often. Right. If a contestant hears a word and it's unrecognizable to them. Right. Their first question is, can I have the etymology or can I have where that word comes from? Because that can really inform how a word is spelled.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Correct. And there are three main layers of English where they come from.
So the first one, Anglo Saxon, is between 15 and 20% of words. There often are one syllable words. They use the vowel Teams, they have silent letters, digraphs. Remember, a digraph is two letters that make one sound that are stuck together.
Words for common, everyday things, irregular spellings, function words, and the most common words in English.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: So and words in that layer, if we're forming long, longer words, usually it's things like compound words.
So things like doghouse, catfish, those kinds of things.
Next up, we have our Latin layer. So actually about 55% of our English words do come from the Latin layer.
Most of these words are multisyllable words. They're organized around a root. They use prefixes and suffixes to change the meaning of the word and then also how the word is used.
They form most of our content. Words of academic language, like social sciences, some of the traditional physical sciences, and definitely in literature. The cool thing about that layer right there, 55% of these words live, that is a highly decodable layer of language, meaning the phonemes and the graphemes.
Most of them have a one to one correspondence. So actually decoding, reading those words and then also turning around and encoding, spelling those words, as long as you understand the rules, that is quite accessible.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: And then we have the Greek layer of language. The this is about 10 to 12% of our words. So spellings like ph for the sound F, ch says K instead of ch, RH says er, and Y that says I. So like at the end, like of a sentence or the middle of a.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: Word, or like in gym.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Yep. G Y M gym construction from combining forms. They're similar to English compound words, but they're a little bit different.
And they tend to be in the philosophical, mathematical, and scientific terms.
So, like, what's a good, like the word graph for, like making a graph in mathematics or a graph in science to kind of report data or photograph.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: Right. Graph meaning picture, photo meaning light. Photograph would be a picture made from light.
So why are we talking about spelling so much on a quote unquote reading podcast?
That is a pretty frank question I get asked from my tutoring clients all the time. I thought I was here to learn how to read. Why are you making me spell?
So why do kids who struggle with reading also struggle with spelling?
[00:10:33] Speaker B: One of the reasons is spelling is more challenging than reading. You have to come up with all the letters on your own. It's not in front of you.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, decoding only really requires that recognition where spelling requires retrieval of those letter patterns. Like Nicole said, without that visual representation to help them.
You know, and it is true that many sounds in English can be spelled in multiple ways. Right. Like, the sound, for example, that has three possible spellings can be F, it could be ff, or it could be ph.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Right.
Students who struggle with reading often have phonological processing weaknesses. This leads to emissions or additions of sounds, or they mix up similar phonemes like the BP sounds, poor sequencing of sounds.
So that makes it very difficult to come up with those. The correct letters, then when you're spelling.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. You know, a good example is something we experience. We were working on a word, like actually a root. Right. Tracked to pull T or act.
Right.
Many of my students who struggle with this phonological processing piece, they want to say track. They want to cut off that last sound, which has a. First of all, it directly impacts spelling because we're missing a sound, and it also obviously impacts meaning and to be able to read that word and lift it off the page correctly.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: And students who struggle with reading may also have orthographic processing weaknesses. So this leads to maybe mixing up the graphenes that look similar, like the ch and the ck. So they'll say the wrong sound.
They may transposition letters. Like, instead of F O, R for four, they might put fro.
Overgeneralization of the spelling patterns. So, like, there's a floss rule where you double certain things at the end. Certain letters at the end of a word. One of that is if it ends with an S. So, like, they may say gas, which is G, A, S, G, A, S, S.
Not realizing that gas is actually short for gasoline. And that's why you don't double.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, and then that over reliance on the phenology part. Part. Just the sound parts alone.
Right. The word. Because how many of our students spell that word? B, E, C, U, z.
Because, you know, not realizing, again, that one is actually the cause. Like it's the cause of something.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Right, Right.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: So if they know that morphology piece there.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: And dialect can really influence this quite a bit. Very much so that's also a reason to teach spelling explicitly, so that people can really pull out the correct letters that go with the sounds.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: So due to the Matthew effect, students who struggle with reading will read less often, thereby encountering written words less often, leading to weaker mental. Orthographic. Orthographic representation of the words and less ability to weight the different spellings by frequency.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. If they're not reading enough words, their brain is not able to file those words in the correct place.
Their brains are not as skilled about being flexible with our spelling, understanding that those sounds may be spelled differently given a different Word for those listeners who are not familiar with the Matthew effect. The Matthew effect is that idea that, you know, the rich become richer, the poor become poorer. How it relates to reading. That's often kind of roped into the idea that the more we read, the more different words that especially young children encounter. Just the better readers they become, the more confident they become in reading as well. And so they just tend to read more. Those are our readers early on that tend to like reading. So they keep doing that. Well, the opposite can also be true, that if they tend to not like reading, they tend to not do it. And then that gap between a skilled reader and speller and a not so skilled reader and speller just gets wider and wider over time.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Correct.
And also, our students with dyslexia really need to see words 100 times more.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Than a student that doesn't have dyslexia. So.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Yeah, it's kind of a twofer there.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
You know, unfortunately, spelling may be a lifelong challenge for some of our students.
So even though we are intervening, we are teaching explicitly, we are in there.
Due to its complex nature, it really, really might be a lifelong struggle for some of our students. I am raising my hand high and true here.
I am not a very skilled speller, despite the fact that I'm a reading interventionist. I read early. I always was the kind of kid who loved reading, saw lots and lots of words early on, but I was not taught explicit spelling rules. That's. Most of us weren't in our generations and the generation ahead of me, most.
Most of us really weren't doing that.
Research, however, does show that spelling instruction does improve reading and spelling. Student spelling can lead to generalization of spelling patterns. So it is still worth the intervention, even though it might be a lifelong struggle.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
And as we know, improvements in spelling can also improve reading.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: There are some sub skills needed for spelling.
So we've talked about some of these before with reading. So phonological awareness, so knowing what sounds and symbols go together, like being able to tell that van is different than fan.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Especially those close, close sounds like that.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: Those can be really confusing.
And then that orthographic knowledge. Right. So that is the. We can kind of think of orthography as, like, the spelling rules that are filed in our brain. Right. Sometimes that's what I. How I talk about them with our students is like, okay, that's. Those are those real spelling rules and having them put in all the right files. Like the word duck. Right.
The word duck would have that digraph ck, it would not be duk, it would be D u C k because of the CK generalization.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: And after you see it so many times, you know it by just looking at it.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Morphological knowledge. So knowing what the different meanings of words are in the pieces of words. So like, for jumped, if you're talking about I jumped rope, it'd be J u m P E d. But jumped J u m p T would not be used because that would mean something different.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. We're looking at. Does that student know that suffix ed, first of all has three sounds? It can sound like ed, d or t. And if we know something happened in the past, we're going to need that suffix ed there.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Semantic knowledge, knowing the difference between meaning and context. So, like, instead of using we're going to the store, you would use T O. But if you're talking about two candles on a cake, you'd use two.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Yep. I want to go two, right? Oh, oh, yes.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Two has three of those.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Tricky, tricky.
You know, and then there's just that kind of mental images of words. Right. So like Nicole was saying earlier, if you have seen a word over and over and over again, you have a mental picture for that word. Like the word head. Right, Head. Just based on phonemes. We might spell it H e D, but we know from seeing that word many, many times, head is H e a d head.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: So what about words that are truly irregular?
[00:20:32] Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, as a reminder, right. This is only about 4% of English words, but there are many names for these kinds of words.
Sometimes they're called sight words or snap words or gotta know words or heart words.
None of those terms necessarily mean truly irregular words.
So that can be a little bit confusing.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: For those words that truly are irregular, this is where we're going to teach explicitly.
We're going to look at these words.
So we're going to.
Yeah, I mean, unfair red words, trouble sticking.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: I mean, there are so many words for these words.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: Yes. So we want to emphasize the pattern of the word that is not decodable and then provide that explicit instruction for that part. So, for example, the word said, like I said it, the word said would be spelled S A I D.
So we would teach the student first of all to look at that word, and then we would say, what part of this word does not follow the expected sound? They would need to know AI has an expected sound of a in the middle of words. Because they might look at that word and say sade.
And we can teach them. Oh, but that first Position sound. Right. That S is making its expected sound, but AI is not. You know, and then D D is making an is expected sound as well. So we're going to focus on the part that is irregular. We're going to explicitly teach that, and we're going to emphasize the parts that are regular.
We always want our students to come away with the idea that actually most words are regular. So, yes, we're going to teach a few.
What we don't want to do is get in the business of teaching every single word that way and having students memorize lots and lots of words. That is a whole language concept and not rooted in science.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: Yeah. I remember memorizing all those words.
I didn't know that there was a floss rule or CK rule or the GE's at the end of the words. That. That was kind of a blow my mind kind of thing.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Oh, same.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: I was like, oh, there's a reason you use GE versus dge.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: I just thought you memorized those very much so. You know, I still think that's probably why I'm such a poor speller, despite now I know these rules, but it's is kind of a lifelong struggle. I think it was one of those skills that I did not pick up very easily as a child. And I think there's a combination of, no, that's all right. If we're not a great speller, I don't think there were very many educators sounding the alarm during the time I was in K12ed about, we actually have to teach spelling explicitly. And actually spelling is important. I think it was kind of early days of, oh, yeah, we have spellcheck now. So you don't apparently need to know how to spell things correctly. Which is untrue, actually, because it's very untrue.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: If you're not even close with the word spellcheck, it's not going to help you or it's going to give you the wrong word and you're not going to know that it's the wrong word, which can cause confusion of the person who's reading it or your meaning being very different than what you wanted it to be.
[00:24:20] Speaker A: Or you may be saying spelling a word that actually is an example. I was working with a student recently. He was writing a compare and contrast, compare and contrast paragraph. He was spelling the word contrast contract.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: Oh, that would be very different.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: That would be very different.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: Well, guess what? Spellcheck was absolutely no help to him there, because every single time he spelled contrast, what he actually was spelling was contract.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: Yeah, so that's kind of a really good example of why knowing the rules and getting as close as possible is important.
[00:25:08] Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly that. You know, it's important.
I don't know if it's me just looking out for. For it lately, but I've been noticing just more and more spelling issues in articles that I'm reading, even from reputable sources. I mean, even some of.
Not to throw anybody under the bus. Education week, but Education Week.
Who, you know, should be very trustworthy. Um, I've really been noticing. Oh, you guys, there's a lot of. I'm not, you know, not trying to be the pot. Call the kettle black here. I mean, I am. I am known for some. Oops. Spelling mistakes.
[00:25:55] Speaker B: That's so. So am I. Yeah. Yeah.
It took a year for somebody to find mine.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:01] Speaker B: Yeah. It was kind of funny.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: Yeah, it was. That was really funny. And yet here we are.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Here we are. Yeah.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, again, we like to have a sense of humor here in the office and we like our kids to have a sense of humor to the students we see, because I'm not trying to say you must be a perfect speller, but we do want them to be competent and confident.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: So it is a very important part of our instruction. Every single thing. We teach reading, we turn right around and we teach for spelling every single time. Lessons will include reading and spelling, despite all of the grumbling.
But that it's. It's really important.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: It is, yeah.
So what is going on beyond dyslexia?
[00:27:01] Speaker A: Oh, yes.
So as we record this, it is the tail end of February, so we are going through a quite cold snap. But there is light on the end of the tunnel, right? At the end of the tunnel. Yes, there is light. We are in the thick of. My daughter's birthday is coming up and this is very important happening in our house. She will be five years old and in case nobody knows that, she would like you to know.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: I can see that.
[00:27:39] Speaker A: Yes, very much. She will be having a unicorn themed birthday.
[00:27:43] Speaker B: Aw.
[00:27:44] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: That sounds like fun.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Very much. Very much.
What's going on with you, Nicole?
[00:27:50] Speaker B: That's a very interesting question.
So my husband had surgery this week and it was very interesting to me to get the paperwork at discharge, which was all written.
So he had nasal surgery and they had to. We have to, you know, take care of it for the next three weeks.
There was some verbal instruction, but no demonstration.
They never under asked me if I understood anything that they were saying or reading.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: So. And it was Amazing to me that there's no pictures of like how to clean the area, like because it's wound. Right. Just like anything else when you have surgery, usually there's a wound somewhere.
And it was just very interesting because all the words that they were using were very technical. I would guess they were above a 5 5th grade level just because of some of the multi syllable words.
And it made me think about how in Wisconsin there's a quite a high percentage of people who are not even at the fourth grade level, grade level reading and how do they follow the directions given.
It's quite amazing to me that it was probably about a six page thing to read and they never asked me if I could read or if he can't read actually because he can't wear his glasses.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: Yeah, separate issue. Yeah, separate issue.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: But even if you could, I mean.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: If you have nasal surgery. Let's think about this, right? If you are a person who wears glasses, even if you. You can't even put contacts in after nasal surgery.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: So that's not an option.
It is amazing. I think this is kind of one of those.
Some people, right, I think have an attitude of like, well, you know, how important really is all that academic language?
And yet again, here's another example of extremely important. Even if this isn't something you're touching every day.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: Most of us are going to experience a medical emergency in our lives.
[00:30:09] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: And having basic understanding of how that all works or all those things. Wow. I think relevant, right?
[00:30:19] Speaker B: Very relevant. Yeah. Yeah. So I just thought it would bring that up since I was thinking about it, looking at all the papers going, huh? Yeah. This would be very hard for somebody who have dyslexia or any other difficulties reading to be able to get through this.
[00:30:36] Speaker A: Wow.
Wow.
Well, thank you everybody for listening. If you like our show, please follow us on social media and reach out if you have any questions or would like us to discuss a topic. We're starting to get some feedback now. We're really excited by that. So please, please reach out, be sure to follow and give us a rating on your favorite podcast player. This is how we reach more listeners and that's how we help more families. So thank you everybody.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: Thank you.
