Are you trying to teach your child to spell? For me, that meant loads of repetition and a new understanding of why English is said to be the hardest language.
Why are these poor letters being dragged out if they're not going to do anything? A shy b here, embarrassed h there, an unassuming l. To say nothing of a nervous l and hidden t, and a ton of others:
- B: climb, comb
- H: heir, honest
- K: knife, know
- L: calf, talk
- O: colonel
- S: debris, island
- T: ballet, listen
- U: guess, guilt
- W: answer, two
It's like being invited to a party and not being able to tell anyone your name or what you're thinking. When my son asked me why the letters were in these words, I had no explanation; none.
Eventually I looked it up and told him the silent letters were originally pronounced. Google told me that since the language evolved across different continents, different cultures changed the way things sounded. When the changes occurred, some letters became silent, but I guess people didn't have the heart to throw them off the word?
Two other reasons I found:
2. The expansion of the British Empire led to words being borrowed from a variety of languages. The words used the original spellings, and if a letter didn't exist, substitutes were used. (That seems like the first point I made, but the website I consulted it thought it was a whole new point, so whatever).
Lastly, silent letters were supposedly introduced to help us differentiate between two words that sound similar or to provide pronunciation guidance. This sounds completely silly, so I think we should just use my original explanation and leave it at that.
As for helping your child with spelling, I would just break the word up in syllables, go through it slowly with them, and go over it with them at least three times. Yes, I know this is time consuming and if you're at work you need some sort of robot (Alexa)? to help?
Other thoughts I found on helping children spell, silent letters or no:
I have always been wondering about that, related to English language, how to learn spelling for children who have it as mother tongue. Because when learning a foreign language, we learn about the same time how to pronounce and how to write it, so it might remain more in memory (or not...) If you have the slightest knowledge of Spanish or Italian, you know that there are a handful of rules on how to read some letters, and a h which is not pronounced. But, compared with the English language, they are a handful only. And the vowels, for example, are always the same - you pronounce A the same way in every word, while in English we have alphabet and water and angel and maybe more... and so is with all the vowels.
ReplyDeleteSo true, Marina. My teachers used to say English was the hardest language and the more I write, the more I agree with them!
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