By Don McCabe, AVKO Educational Research Foundation
Don McCabe is the Research Director Emeritus of the non-profit AVKO Educational Research Foundation, the author of Sequential Spelling as well as The Patterns of English Spelling and over 30 different books on reading and spelling which can be found described on www.avko.org which has a section for its members from which over $500 worth of AVKO books are available as FREE downloads.
One of the many things everyone who can read, knows, is how to correctly pronounce the following groups of letters whenever they see them in words: fici, missi, and titi! But, they don’t know that they know it. Would you believe that all three of these letter pattern groups rhyme? The question is: Do they rhyme with: Ricky, sissy, or wish.
George Bernard Shaw once said that our language is so crazy we might just spell the word fish as ghoti. His reasoning was the letters gh have the /f/ sound in the word enough. The letter o is the short i in the word women, and the letters ti have the /sh/ sound in the word nation.
While Shaw’s “reasoning” is clever, it is not very accurate. There is no word in English language that starts with gh that has the /f/ sound and there is no word in English that ends with the letters ti being pronounced /sh/. But we do spell the sound /fish/ as …fici…in all words where the sound does not contain the meaning of fish. In my official position as the author, I hope you will agree that this article is beneficial and that should be sufficient to make my point that ….fici…. rhymes with wish.
For those of us who are good readers, we haven’t a clue as to how our God-given computer brains allow us to automatically correctly pronounce the pattern of letters of …missi… the instant we see a word such as mission, emission, submission, commission and with your permission I’ll suggest that about the only exception to the sound “mish” being spelled missi in polysyllabic words is when it’s spelled …mich… as in Michigan. And yes, there is the State of Mississippi. That’s why I used the phrase “about the only exception.|
By now, you probably have figured out that the letter combination of …titi… is pronounced “tish” as in petition, repetition, competition. The question that probably is vexing you right now, is “Why should we teach that the letter combinations fici, missi, and titi are pronounced fish, mish, and tish, respectively? My answer is, we don’t need to. What we need to do is to teach that in “fancy big” words that cannot be reduced to one meaningful syllable as the word fisherman can, the sound “sh” is never spelled sh. But poor spellers often misspell words such as precious as preshus, superstitious as superstishus, special as speshul, anxious as angshus, chic as sheek, etc. What needs to be taught that you already know is that there are many ways of spelling the /sh/ sound in the “big” or “fancy” words and those that share the same pattern should be taught at the same time.
Just as I believe the “simple” words rain, train, strain, restrain, brain, chain, pain, Spain, along with over forty others, should be taught as spelling words together, so too, I believe the cial, …tial (“shull”) words and the …cious, …tious, …xious, (“shus”) words should be taught as groups together. When you’re teaching and you encounter a word such as crucial, a student might attempt sounding it out by applying the rule that the letter c has two sounds: /k/ as in cat and /s/ as in city and end up reading crucial as crucky al, crewky al, or croosy al. This is the time you might want to give the child the pronunciation (and meaning) but make a note of it for a lesson later on in the day. No need to break up the story s/he is reading. Later on in the day, you should teach the …cial (“SHULL”) words by pointing out the letters ci form the /sh/ digraph and the letters al at the ends of words are pronounced ull (as in dull) making cial pronounced “shull” as in special, social, racial, facial, official, commercial, beneficial, financial, and finally crucial. Have the words written out, and when that student correctly reads the word crucial, smile and point out that it’s the word s/he couldn’t read earlier in the day, s/he now can.
Let me demonstrate that one of the most common “rules” of our language is that our letters are sounded out left to right. Well, in Russian, Italian, and Spanish that’s true, but not in English. Let’s start with the prefix DE as in deduct. Add an M and we get DEM. Add O and we get DEMO. Add an N and we get DEMON. Add S we get DEMONS. Now suppose we add the letters TRAT…, what will we end up with? When I use this example in a DEMONSTRATion, most of the audience will come up demonstrate, but then I just have to add IVE to come up with DEMONSTRATIVE.
Another popular phonics “rule” is that the letter “A” has two sounds: ă as in apple and ā as in ape. Yet we all know that the first word in the dictionary is the word “a” which is pronounced ǝ (“uh” as in a dog, a cat, a house, a glass of water). And we all know that the letter “A” is pronounced ä (“ah” as in ma, pa, spa, fa, la, and haha). We all know that. What we also know (without knowing that we know it) is the sound the letter “A” makes is dependent upon its neighbors. With no letters next to it, it’s the word a (pronounced “uh”). Put consonants to the right and it’s a short A as in rat and hat. Place a silent e after the consonant and it becomes a long A as in rate and hate. Somehow we know that in words like wan, swan, wand, wander, and squander that the letters a-n were not pronounced “an” as in ran. Likewise, we know that the w changes the “ar” to the or sound in wart, quart, warm, and warn. And we know that the only way the “wur” sound is spelled when it isn’t the word “were” is wor.. as in word, worm, worth, world, work etc. We know that the double u (w) that changes the sound of the letter a and the u in ua is really a consonant, its twin w. Now the spellings of words like Guam, Guatemala, squawk, squat, squatter, squalor, suave, began to make a little bit of sense.
So now that we know that we know these quirks of our language, we can now teach them. DM
