Question 1 of our summer spelling series: plural cancelling silent e.
True, false or somewhere in between?
Does the final ‘silent’ <e> in words like house, moose, because etc exist to remind people it is not a plural or a 3rd person singular?
I’ve been told this comes from Orton Gillingham rather than any academic source but do correct me if I’ve got that wrong. That Spelling Thing works from speech to print so our take on this is different. Our approach starts with saying the word clearly – hearing spoken syllables – attaching graphemes – then identifying the student’s own tricky bits and using a variety of strategies for remembering the correct spelling.
In this instance, instead of preloading memory by teaching rules, we would wait to see if a student makes mistakes like those below. Many struggling spellers won’t confuse eyebrows and browsing in shops or even think of them as similar. When you teach a spelling rule to everyone rather than responding to a mistake, you can end up with over-corrections that are much harder to undo than simple spelling errors. (See examples in section 1.)
There are only a handful of words governed by the rule and two ways to make mistakes.
- Verb/noun: browse/brows, expose/expos, lapse/laps, please/pleas, tease/teas
- Noun/noun: prose/pros, moose/moos
- Adjective/noun: dense/dens, loose/loos, tense/tens
1. A student writes ‘I plucked my eyebrowse’ or ‘I ran 10 lapse’.
This indicates either:
- The student doesn’t understand adding s to indicate ‘more than 1’ of something
- and/or they’ve tried really hard to remember all the functions of ‘silent e’ and they know there are several so they will always throw one in and hope it lands in the right place. (That’s an actual example from a dyslexic adult doing That Reading Thing after years of being taught spelling rules that made him panic.)
- The tricky bit is remembering that <se> isn’t a way to make a word plural so it must be an <s> by itself. Do lots of singular/plural pairs. You can also look at adding <es> in words like ‘houses’ if they need it.
- (Aside) I always say ‘if they need it’ because I learned the hard way about teaching a program rather than teaching a student. That Reading Thing has a support level to practise reading words ending -ed (‘stepped’ versus ‘fasted’). It used to be a regular level that all students did rather than just those who misread ‘bagged’ as ‘bagg-ed’ and we ended up with a couple of students over-correcting and sounding bizarrely Shakespearean. We replaced the teaching activity with a short passage of text written in the past tense so now offer further practice only to those who need it.
2a. A student writes ‘I like to brows in shops’ or ‘Don’t teas your sister’.
The tricky bit is remembering the <se> grapheme. Is this perhaps where the silent e rule comes in? Rather than talking about silent e marking the verb (applicable to a few pairs of words), work on noticing when they’ve written a plural noun (applicable to thousands of words). Then talk about how to spell the word they wanted to write. Deal with these one at a time as they arise in writing.
2b. A student creates plurals of non-words
The errors in 1 and 2a all result in at least slightly plausible words. What if a student chronically and consistently uses only <s> on every word where they hear /z/ or /s/ at the end? Time for some gentle educational humour. This is specifically where I would avoid talking about silent e because those with the quirkiest brains will remember it incorrectly. Instead, we’ll have some fun with errors. If this turns into mockery, you haven’t got the point! It’s about guiding a student to making correct decisions about the language rather than trying to recall a rule.
<hous> – Ask if they mean more than one hou. How would they change that? (You will give them the answer the first couple of times.)
<chees> – Did they want to talk about more than one chee? How would they change that?
<nurs> – How many nurs do you know? I only know one nur. How could we make that nurse?
Pretty soon they are self-correcting, asking themselves if it’s more than more of a thing rather than a single thing ending <se>. Have some fun. Play a game. Use bribery.
(A final aside re bribery. One of my all-time favourite reviews of That Reading Thing was from a 15-year-old who went from illiterate to reading thanks to a kind neighbour:
It is really helping. I would do it even without the candy.