Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Orthography
Orthography
A participant in an on-line SWI course shares joyous tales of how struggling students
are responding her new orthographic understanding
If you look up the etymology of any word re ected by this connection with the idea of “batting around ideas” that
matrix, you will nd your way back to the Latin root happens in a discussion. When we have a rich
quat(ere), quass(us) for “to strike, shake.” This is the
discussion, we may be lucky enough to shake up our
sense and meaning the in nitive quat(ere) and its past previous thinking, and gain a new understanding!
participle quass(us) had in Latin. It is from this etymology
that we nd the “orthographic denotation” of any present The investigation share on the following pages has
day word that derives from this Latin root.1 Some of the nothing to do with the word “discussion.” I simply wanted
sense and meaning “shake, strike,” no matter how faint, to bring out this sense and meaning to consider as you
will be present in any word that derives from that root. read the following orthographic discussion. Perhaps this
This “shaking and striking” is obvious for a word like batting around of orthographic hypotheses will shake up
“percussion.” But this orthographic denotation is more your thinking about English spelling, and how we can use
metaphorical for “discussion.” But once we trace the explicit instruction, guided by scienti c inquiry, of how our
orthographic denotation “shake and hit” from an orthography system works.
etymological reference, we can perceive that semantic
1 Etymology shows us the bound base <cuss> is unrelated to the free base <cuss> which is from an Old English root, and is related to “curse.”
Thank you again for the great class! I'm excited to dig So great! You have helped these students have the
deeper with my students this week. You asked for a experience of at least two crucial messages about
reminder to send everyone the story about the student spelling.
who learned their letter sounds from learning with • The spelling system has order they didn’t know before.
morphemes.
• They can independently recognize this order by
See that story here. Also see this story with this same investigating the structures of words.
student when we investigated the word <durable> that I
In your early attempts at drawing children’s attention to
think you’ll nd very apt for your work too.
morphological structure, note that students are
[And now HERE is a recent video with this same student discovering structures that are not even the ones you
who is now thriving in literacy.] were emphasizing. But you were able to capitalize on this
This story might shed light on my principal's question important moment for this learner. This is a key aspect of
about SWI. She is interested in how well special not being tied to a strict lesson sequence if a child’s line