stress

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Instead of peeking through the curtain, open the window and really take in the view.

Someone asked a really great question in a Facebook group the other day.  They specifically wondered why the word ‘chocolate’ didn’t follow the “a_e” rule.  In other words, the pronunciation of the last three letters isn’t what is expected.  (Just in case you are unfamiliar with this rule,  many phonics programs refer to this as the “split vowel magic e rule” or the “split digraph magic e rule”.  The underscore represents a consonant. When students see this pattern and the ‘e’ is silent, the ‘a’ will have its long pronunciation.)

The first two people responded with saying that ‘chocolate’ isn’t a word from English, so it won’t follow English conventions.  That idea is generally true.  Recognizing that a word is not following English spelling conventions is actually a way to spot that a word is probably a loan word.  I’m thinking of words like kiwi, ski, khaki, and bikini that have a final ‘i.’  Typically complete English words won’t have an ‘i’ final.    They won’t typically have a final ‘u’ either.  Examples of words from other languages that don’t follow this English convention are bayou, haiku, tofu, tutu, caribou, and plateau.

While stating that chocolate is a loan word so it won’t follow English spelling rules isn’t false, it won’t help much when a student asks about fortunate, delicate, accurate, or desperate.  In my mind, the question broadens to become, “Why aren’t these other words (and perhaps ‘chocolate’ as well) following this rule?”  Other people commenting on the post identified words such as I have listed as exceptions.  That is unfortunate.

Let’s think for a moment about labeling a word as an exception.  What happens then?  Nothing.  The door shuts on that word.  No one tries any further to understand what else might be affecting that word’s ability to follow the rule.  (Or to consider that the “rule” might be worthy of critical contemplation.)  Students are expected to accept that “exception” is the only understanding they will receive.  They will need to remember which words follow the rule and which words are exceptions to that rule.

What I have always taught students is, “Just because I don’t know something about a certain spelling doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for it.”  With that kind of thinking, we are opening the door again on any word that others label as an exception.  We are free to think further and collect evidence so we have something to consider.  Who knows?  We may garner an understanding that will help with remembering a word’s spelling in a way that calling it an exception just doesn’t.

Let’s take a further look at these words considered to be exceptions.  I went to Neil Ramsden’s Word Searcher to quickly find words that had the same ending pronunciation as ‘chocolate.’

With a list this long, it seems a burden to ask students to remember that these are exceptions to the “a_e” rule.  If they don’t remember, and spell the words according to how they pronounce them, they are likely to use ‘it’ or ‘ite’ at the end of each of these words.  To add to this, I found words in which the final <ate> can be pronounced in two ways, depending on how the word is used in a sentence.  Notice how the pronunciation of the same word changes as it changes its grammatical function  (adjective or noun to verb).

Again, this seems like another burden for students who will now be taught that sometimes a word will be an exception and sometimes it will not.  There just has to be a more elegant explanation that will truly help our students.  What is it that is different in the pronunciation of animate and chocolate?  It is the pronunciation of the final ‘ate.’  We’ve known that from the start.  But what governs the pronunciation of that final part of the word?  Stress.  In all of the discussions about spelling “rules” that I see online, very few ever address stress.  Stress is one of those things about our language that sets it apart from other languages.  It is also one of the things that makes learning our language and speaking it as a native would difficult for many.

Our language is stress timed.  If you’re not familiar with that idea (as I wasn’t when I began studying English spelling), you might be wondering what that even means.  Simply put, it means that when we speak, we put the main stress or emphasis on one of the syllabic beats in a word.  If a word has only one syllabic beat, then that is where we place the stress.  Examples of words with one syllabic beat are frog, bed, mask, and light.  When you announce those words, you put emphasis on the beginning of the word.

Now consider a word with two syllabic beats such as open, garden, begin, and exposed.  Think about where we put the stress when we pronounce those words.  Do we say “Open the door,” or do we say, “oPEN the door?”  We put the stress on the first beat in that word.  It is the same with ‘garden.’  We say GARden instead of garDEN.  What about ‘begin?’  With this word, we actually put the main stress on the second syllabic beat.  Think about it.  Do we say “BEgin your work,” or “beGIN your work?”  We put the stress on the second syllabic beat.  It is the same with ‘exposed.’  Test it for yourself.  Do you say EXposed or exPOSED?  My guess is you say it with the stress on the second beat.

In polysyllabic words, one syllabic beat will have the main stress.  We may raise our pitch as we announce it and we may hold it longer than we hold other syllables.  Sometimes other beats have stress as well – just not has heavy.  That is called secondary stress.  But the remaining syllabic beats in those words?  They are unstressed.  And when a syllabic beat is unstressed, the vowel in that particular beat will become reduced to the point that we call it a schwa.

When I have introduced IPA and the idea of stress to my students, I did so by showing them the IPA symbols that correspond to the graphemes in their names, including the stress marks.  One year I had boys whose names were Jaydin, Jackson, Aidan, and Kayden.  When you say those names, you will notice that you put the main stress on the first syllabic beat of each name.  That means that the second syllabic beat of each name is unstressed.  With these names, it doesn’t matter which vowel letter we see in front of the final <n>.  They are all pronounced the same because they all are unstressed and therefore are reduced in their quality enough to be considered a schwa.  When I pointed this out to my students, they thought it was pretty cool.  They always wondered why the pronunciation of the second part of their names was the same even though the spelling wasn’t.  Here’s a small video clip of two students talking about having learned IPA.

The second student in the video is named Ava.  Now that she understands that there is stress on the first syllabic beat in her name, but not on the second, she understands why the two a’s are not pronounced the same!  I know that many teachers talk about the schwa sound with students, but I don’t believe that many talk about stress in words or stress in sentences.  My guess is that they don’t spend time talking about it because they didn’t learn about it themselves.  Because of that, they don’t know quite what to say.

There is a great resource for people who fall into the category of not knowing how to talk about stress seeing as how it was never explicitly taught to them.  It’s called Rachel’s English.  She has a series of videos that are actually there to help non-native English speakers sound more like native English speakers.  One of the things someone learning English probably struggles with is stress – especially if their native language is a syllable timed language like French, Italian, Korean, or Spanish.  In those languages, each syllable has the same amount of emphasis. No part of the word or sentence stands out in the same way that they do in English.

When I was first trying to wrap my head around this idea of our language being stress timed, I watched several of these videos.  Here is another one that I found to be very helpful.

In the second video, Rachel demonstrates stress with the sentence, “I saw her at the meeting.”  When she says it, the primary stress is on the verb ‘saw’ and the secondary stress is on the first syllabic beat of ‘meeting.’  One of the joys of English is that we can change the meaning of a simple sentence like this by changing where we put the stress.  I can imagine reading this sentence with the primary stress on ‘I’ and meaning something different than if I put that stress on ‘her.’  The two function words in this sentence (at, the) would probably not carry the primary stress in this sentence very often.

Her next example sentence illustrates that the words in a sentence that are not stressed are reduced.  The sentence she uses is, “I got this for you.”  It is the function word ‘for’ that is reduced and announced more like ‘frr.’  Can you picture a student who is saying that sentence to themselves as they write it, spelling the word ‘for’ as ‘fer?’  Me too.  It makes me wonder about the students I have had who misspelled a word different ways in a single writing.  Could it be that the placement of stress in those sentences affected the way the student pronounced the word in that sentence?  And if a student is taught to sound out words in order to spell them, they might indeed spell a word one way in one sentence and another way in another sentence.

The next video I’m including is longer than the first two, but continues on with this idea of what we do as we speak.  I am fascinated watching these videos of Rachel’s.  When we don’t introduce stress to students either at the word level or at the sentence level, we are leaving out such a crucial piece!  This kind of discussion could help students understand why they are misspelling some words.  It could also lead to a discussion that spelling based solely on pronunciation is prone to error.  There are just too many contributing factors.  Spelling based on morphemes, on the other hand, leads to spelling accuracy and a built-in understanding of a word’s sense and meaning.

Now that you have a better idea of how inherent stress is to our speech and how important it is to our understanding of spelling, I’d like to return to the words that were mentioned at the beginning of this post.  Below I’ve given you the opportunity to compare the graphemes to the phonemes in each word including stress marks.  I used toPhonetics to get a spelling to IPA transcription.  What do you now notice?

Every one of these words has its primary stress on the very first syllabic beat.  That means that the other syllables in each word are unstressed.  This explains why the first <e> in ‘delicate’ is representing the phoneme /ɛ/, but the following <i> and <a> graphemes are both representing the phoneme /ə/.  The same thing happens in ‘fortunate’, ‘accurate’, and ‘chocolate.’

The words ‘chocolate’ and ‘desperate’ have something else in common.  Each looks like it would have three written syllabic beats, but when spoken, there would only be two.  Notice the greyed ‘o’ in ‘chocolate’ and the greyed medial ‘e’ in ‘desperate.’  They are greyed because they are not graphemes representing phonemes.  Those two particular letters in those particular spellings are so unstressed in the pronunciations of those words that they have been zeroed!  The other greyed letters in this collection of words are all the single final non-syllabic ‘e’ that is also not a grapheme.  It is there as part of the <ate> suffix.  It may mark the pronunciation of the ‘a’ in the suffix when we see it in another member of the word family (desperation), but not necessarily.  The <ate> suffix is usually seen on nouns and adjectives whose base derived from Latin.  It is the stress placement in the word that determines the pronunciation of the <a> in that suffix.

Above, I gave you examples of words with this <ate> suffix that can be used in two ways.  Below I compare the IPA and stress marks on two of those words when the words are used in the two ways.

The difference, as you can see, is that when the word is used as an adjective or noun, there is only one primary stress in the word.  That leaves the remaining syllables unstressed and the pronunciation will reflect that by way of reducing the pronunciation of the vowels until they are a schwa.  When the same word is functioning as a verb, you can see that the word now has two stress marks.  One is primary (ˈ) and one is secondary (ˌ).  In both words, there are two syllabic beats that are stressed and one that is not.  That unstressed syllable is where we see the schwa.

Reflection

If you are telling your students that sometimes a vowel is pronounced as a schwa, but you’re not telling them why, then you’re not helping them see the logic of English spelling.  Without meaning to, you are contributing to the misconception that spelling is weird and hard to understand.   How confusing must it be for a student to hear that sometimes vowels are reduced and can all sound similar, but then not to be told when this might happen.  This assignment of a schwa must feel very random to a student when in fact it is not.  Not at all.

English is a stress-timed language.  It is not syllable-timed.  Yet, many children are exposed to hours and hours of work with syllables and syllable types and little to no time spent understanding how the stress-timing of our language affects our speech.  It is time to recognize the problems created by looking at English spelling with such a superficial lens as pronunciation.  It is time to prepare the students for words they are encountering now and the words they will encounter in the future.  To do that, we must teach how the English spelling system works.  And to do that we must include instruction on morphology, etymology, and phonology (including stress).  Trying to explain a spelling without considering stress, morphemes, or etymology is like trying to explain how a plant gets its nutrients by only looking at the surface of a leaf.  If you want to understand the system, you have to be aware of all of the components and see how they work together.  You can’t peek through the curtain and expect to see the full view.  You must open the window and really take in the view.

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“Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking.” ~ Antonio Machado

Last fall Daniel came into my classroom with writing that was almost indecipherable.  Even the most common words were misspelled.  When asked to read his writing, he stumbled, often saying, “I don’t know what that says.”  But he had a lot to say.  His head was full of humorous stories and his life was full of interesting moments.  This was fifth grade!  I wondered, “How did he get this far with such an obstacle?”

Knowing that whatever happened or didn’t happen in his previous years of schooling wouldn’t help me now, I put that on the back burner in my brain.  The only consideration given to those thoughts was the recognition that I had something to offer Daniel that hadn’t been offered to him before.  Orthography.  Perhaps this would be the year when misunderstandings about English would stop blocking his ability to express his ideas in written form.

All you need to do is read back through this blog to see the kinds of activities and explorations that happened in my class during the last year.  Beyond what I’ve posted about, we spoke ‘words’ every day.  Often I pulled misspelled words from student work, and we talked about them.  I wasn’t looking to spot out “wrong” spellers, but rather what the student might have been thinking about as he/she spelled the word.  What strategy was being used?  How might this misspelling benefit us?  What might we all learn from it?  Often times it was this activity that dictated the direction we needed to take next.

Because of looking at misspellings, we looked at the suffixing conventions.  We started with knowing when to replace the final non-syllabic <e> and when not to.  I used a flow chart so that they could see the predictability of this convention.  It didn’t take long before the majority of the students were writing <making> instead of  *makeing.  We looked at the other suffixing conventions in the same way.  There was always an immediate effect in their writing.

Because of looking at misspellings, we looked at the use of <k> and <ck> in words.  Students made a list of words whose spelling included <ck>.  They compared that to a list of words whose spelling included a <k>.  When comparing, they looked at the position of the phoneme within the base (initial, medial, final).   For instance, the <ck> in <picking> is not medial, it is final.  The base is <pick> and the <ck> is final in the base.  When they got the hang of keeping their focus on the base element, they found that <ck> is most often found in the final position of a base and is never initial.  The next thing to compare were the letters immediately preceding the <k> or <ck>.  They noticed that a single vowel always preceded the <ck>, and it was always short.  They also noticed that when <k> was final in the base, there were either two vowels preceding it or a consonant (usually <r> or <n>).  Students conducted research in the same way for <ge> and <dge>.  This particular research felt so scientific that I had the students calculate percentages to represent how often they found certain things (<r> before a final <k>, for example).

Because of looking at misspellings, we looked at the phonology of <c>.  Students made lists of words in which the grapheme <c> represented /s/ and /k/ in words.  We made lists for several days in a row, until students could confidently explain why the /s/ or /k/ pronunciation was used.  Knowing that there was a reliable way of knowing how to pronounce the grapheme <c> in a word was a light bulb moment for my students.  “Why didn’t we know this in second grade?  It would have been so helpful!”

Because of looking at misspellings, we looked at the phonology of <t>.  Students made lists of words in which the grapheme <t> represented /t/, /ʃ/, or /tʃ/.  Students who have already memorized the spelling of <motion> know that *moshun is wrong, but they don’t understand that the mistake is related to the phonology of the <t>.  In order to talk about these three phonemes, I needed to explain that the IPA symbol /ʃ/ represents the pronunciation of <t> in words like <lotion>, <action> and <edition>, and the IPA symbol /tʃ/ represents the pronunciation of <t> in words like <creature>, <actual>, and <question>.  This inquiry really made the students slow down and think about pronunciation.  It also made them aware of what is really going on in the spelling of the word – especially since they wrote the words in the lists as word sums.  They began to realize that pronunciation of a final <t> in a base element can change depending on the suffix that follows it.

Because of looking at misspellings, we looked at assimilated prefixes.  In groups of three, students were assigned a prefix group to explore.  For example, one group looked at <con->, <com->, <cor->, <col->, and <co->.  Another group looked at <in>, <il>, <ir>, and <im>.  Once they realized that many prefixes have variations in their spelling, the students slowed down and spent a moment considering when making hypotheses about a word sum.  I began seeing <immature> instead of *imature, <illegal> instead of *ilegal, and <corrode> instead of *corode.

Because of looking at misspellings, we looked at the role of the final non-syllabic <e> in various words.  It didn’t take the students long to be able to share with others at least 6 or 7 reasons for it to be there.  One way of sharing what was learned was to make a video called, “For <e>’s a Jolly Good Fellow“.  Knowing why the final non-syllabic <e> is in a word makes it easier to remember to include it when spelling!  I began seeing <change> instead of *chang and <breathe> instead of <breath> (when breathe was what was needed).

There was certainly much more we learned by looking at the words my students were using and misspelling, but I think you get the idea of how I turned “spelling mistakes” into something rich and useful.  Which takes us back to Daniel.  The orthography we were doing encompassed wonderful things he had never been asked to think about before.  But was it enough?  Will his next teacher wonder about his writing obstacle the way I had last fall?  The truthful answer is, “maybe.”

Daniel made a lot of progress.  He improved his writing in a lot of ways.  Besides looking at orthography, we studied grammar and writing.  There was a lot of practice at all of it.  But when I ran into Daniel’s mom a week after school was out,  I offered to tutor him for the summer.  Why had I done that?  What did I think I could accomplish in a few sessions that I wasn’t able to accomplish in a school year?

Some things that I learned about Daniel during the school year:   He is a dodger.  Anytime he is in a group, he counts on someone else to take the lead and he waits for their direction. He does what they tell him.  He writes what they tell him. It’s easier that way.  He pretends to be listening in class, but isn’t always.  He does not ask questions when he is confused.  His misspellings and poor writing have been pointed out so many times that he accepts failure as the norm.  He is not angry, just accepting.  He sees no point in trying to fix something that is part of the definition of who he is.  The strategy that he sticks to (that gets him into more spelling errors than not) is to “sound it out”.

I knew he “hid” in a larger class.  If I worked with him one-on-one, I felt he stood a better chance.

I started our first session by asking him to write a few sentences about his summer.  As usual, I was looking for mistakes he was making in his writing.  As it turned out, he wrote great sentences and there was only one word misspelled.  It was *calfes.  This led to a great investigation of pluralizing words such as <wolf>, <wife>, <half>, <knife>, and more.

After that I pictured a spelling error I had seen him make during the school year.  He had used the letter sequence ‘ints’ when he should have used the suffix <-ence>.  He was trying to sound out the word and spell it according to what he though he was hearing.  So he and I made two lists.  We made a list of words with the <-ence> suffix and a list of words that had a final ‘nts’ letter sequence.  The first list included words like <difference>, <reference>, <influence> and <evidence>.  The second list included words like <cents>, <quotients>, <agreements> and <payments>.  When asked to compare the two lists, Daniel recognized that the second list of words were all plural!  Then we went through each word, identifying its morphemes and talking about how it is used, and then spelling it out.  By that I mean he wrote it down, and then spelled each word aloud with a pause between each morpheme.  By doing this, he saw that <-ence> was consistently a suffix.

During the next session we reviewed the phonology of <t>.  We made lists and he spelled the words out.  We talked about the morphemes, their sense and meaning, and any related words.  We also reviewed <wolf> to <wolves>.

At the most recent session, we went back to the <-ence> suffix.  I wanted to fluctuate between <-ence> and <-ent>.  So I asked him to spell <evidence> and then <evident>, <influence> and then <influential>  (Reviewing the phonology of <t>).  We talked about them, and then I had him spell them out.  When we came to <dependence>, we paused to talk about the bound base <pend>.  We talked about a pendulum and a pendant and how they relate to being a dependent child.  Daniel spelled the word on paper and then out loud.  Thinking about another related word, I threw out the word <independence>.  Daniel quickly explained how the prefix <in-> brought a sense of “not” to the word before he proceeded to write the word on his paper.  When he spelled it out, I was surprised.  He had spelled <in – du – pend – ence>.

Interesting!  I asked him why the spelling of the prefix <de-> changed when we added the prefix <in-> to the word.  He said, ” I don’t know.  It just does?”  Interesting.  So even as I’m training him to spell out with morphemes, he’s still listening to the Queen of Hearts in his ear bellowing, “Sound it out!”

It was time to switch gears and talk about stress and the schwa.  When we pronounce the word <dependence>, the stress is on the second syllable.  Even though the first syllable is unstressed, the <e> is still pronounced clearly as a long <e>.  When we pronounce the word <independence>, there is stress on both the first and third syllables.  Some might consider the third syllable to be the primary stress in this word and the first to be secondary stress.  Either way, the second syllable becomes even more unstressed than it was in <dependence>, and the <e> in <de-> is pronounced as a schwa <ə>.  In this word, the schwa pronunciation is similar to the way we pronounce a short <u>.

To illustrate the point better, I brought up the word <chocolate>.  I asked him to say it.  We both noticed that when you say the word, there are two syllables, but when you go to write it, you think of three.  That <o> in the middle is a schwa with zero pronunciation when this word is spoken!  He played around with this idea for a bit and smiled as he spoke and the schwa syllable disappeared.

This discussion led us back to the first time Daniel spelled <dif-fer-ence> as *dif-r-ints.  I showed him both spellings and asked why he might have missed the <e> in the bound base <fer>.  The idea of written syllables versus spoken syllables was becoming slightly comfortable one.  The idea of a vowel having a schwa pronunciation was almost a relief!  When we meet again, we will pick up where this left off.  I’ll be ready with a list of words in which the schwa has altered the way the letter used might typically be pronounced.

*** Note to reader:  Daniel is a real student.  Daniel is not his real name.