How to Help Dyslexic Students with Unfamiliar Words
A student stumbled over the word company while reading. He was putting the stress on the second syllable, saying “comPANy” instead of “COMpany.” How can we help dyslexic students with unfamiliar words?
You can apply this approach to any word your student struggles to read or spell!
Spell it out
First, be sure they are noticing every letter in the spelling. Ask them to spell it out loud. Often that makes the word click. More about that here.
Talk about the pronunciation
Talk about the pronunciation. Talk about the stress and lack of it on each syllable in company. In company, the syllable spelled <com-> is stressed. Stressed means that it gets more vocal time, is sometimes louder, is sometimes a bit higher, and is said with more emphasis than other syllables.
The last two spoken syllables spelled <pa> <ny> aren’t stressed. The <a> is a reduced vowel (schwa). If a student doesn’t recognize the word, sounding it out may not lead to the accepted pronunciation. They may put the stress on the wrong syllable.
With the reduced vowel in the middle, your student’s spelling will likely need some help too. For dyslexic students, we need to help them SEE the spelling as opposed to just “hearing” it. We’ll learn more about the sounds (phonemes) in this word family in just a minute.
Do they know what it means?
A word without the meaning is meaningless! We read for meaning. Use the word in a sentence. Talk about different meanings:
- The electric company sent the bill. (a business)
- I enjoyed your company at the concert. (companionship)
Where did it come from?
We want the spelling to make sense. Look company up in Etymonline.com. Where did the word come from? How has the spelling evolved? Has the meaning changed over time? All of my dyslexic students enjoy learning why we have an unexpected spelling.
This only shows the first paragraph. In the third paragraph, we learn that the meaning of “trade guilds” and a “business association” associated with this word started in the 14th century. Sometimes a word’s meaning stays basically the same over centuries, and sometimes it changes drastically.
We know <com-> is a common prefix having the sense of “with, together,” and there it is in the entry in bold red print. The Latin noun, panis meaning “bread,” is also part of this word’s history and modern spelling. “Bread” is the orthographic denotation, the historical meaning of the Latin word and it adds to the meaning of the modern English word.
People who “broke bread together” were company, whether they were visitors who came to your home or strangers you met. Consider a company of soldiers who lived and worked together. In a business type of company, all the employees are working together for a common goal, whether they eat bread together or not.
Optional relatives for now or later
If you’re interested to learn what other relatives there are and expand your student’s vision from one word to a word family, enter the Latin root into the search bar. Morphological relatives share the same modern base spelling like companion, companies, and accompany. Some words are only etymologically related but not morphological relatives like pantry.
You can decide how far you go with etymological discovery. Your students will likely run into more unfamiliar words and that can be a good thing!
The following snippet of the Etymonline.com entry shows the same Latin root, panis. The modern English base spelling is the same with an <-ion> suffix added.
Morphological relatives: the “word family”
Etymonline.com and other etymology dictionaries do not provide morphological information, but we can gather clues for what might be a word’s morphology (structure) from the etymology.
Morphological relatives share a base spelling as well as a common etymological ancestor so they are more closely related than words which share a common ancestor without sharing the same base spelling. Morphological words are a morphological word family. These words could be used in a matrix together.
What would the word sum for company be? How about companion? What’s the base? Is there a prefix? Is there a suffix or more than one? Ask your students and work through the process together. Let your student take a shot at the word sum. Encourage trial and error. Help your student apply what you’ve learned from its etymology.
Why is there an <e> added to the base?
com + pane + y –> company
Why does the base spelling above have a final <e>? We know the complete spelling of company doesn’t have a doubled <n> as it might if we were adding a vowel suffix to a base spelling like <run>: run + y –> runny. Since there isn’t <nn> in company, I assume the modern English spelling of the base is <pane>.
The matrix below shows more of this word family. The morphemes (meaningful word part) are in cells. To use the <-ed> suffix and create a real word, students need to add <y> before the <ed>. You might only want to do one or two word sums with your students. It’s not better or worse to do more. Do what is best for your students.
The words outside the matrix rectangle but inside the blue circle are etymological relatives but not morphological relatives, meaning they have an etymological connection through the Latin panis, but their base spelling is not <pane>.
It’s interesting to recognize the meaning connection and similarities in spelling for these words except for biscotti.
What other suffixes or prefixes work in this word family?
Talk about prefixes and suffixes used in the morphological word family. The goal is creating real words. You can teach a suffixing convention like replacing/dropping a final E or changing Y to I while you’re working on this word family. They see the reason for it and put it into practice. It makes the suffixing convention useful to them. You’ll help dyslexic students by giving them many practice opportunities with these suffixing rules.
More about the phonemes
Dig into the interesting grapheme-phoneme correspondences such as <o> spelling /ʌ/short-U in <com-> and how stress affects the pronunciation of the <a> in company and companion. With the stress on the first syllable in company, the rest of the word gets less time in our mouth. But in companion, the stress is on the middle syllable so we have a more distinct /æ/ short-A vowel sound, despite the nasal /n/ following it.
Play with the phonology
Dyslexic students enjoy noticing what their tongue, lips, air, etc. are doing as they pronounce words. It helps them feel and make sense of what’s going on. Many of our students struggle with distinguishing phonemes.
Try this yourself. Say the word companion, but stop yourself before you finish the /jən/ “yun” ending. Where’s your tongue? Mine’s at the top of my mouth about mid-way back. Feel it. Do it more than once to really feel where it is.
Now say the word again, slow down at the second syllable but finish the word. Where did your tongue go? What are your lips doing? How is this different from what happens when you say other words ending with <-ion> like vision or nation?
The <-ion> is unstressed /ən/ but the phoneme /n/ before the /ən/ impacts the pronunciation and it feels like /jən/. That’s called co-articulation. Other words with a <n> followed by <-ion> will be fun to try with your students. They’ll better understand why they sometimes want to spell companion or opinion with a <y> like *companyun or *opinyin.
Give your dyslexic students the tools they need to recognize this tendency and understand it. (Symbols used to show the phonemes/sounds are IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet.)
Don’t forget to write it
Reading and writing go together. Students need more practice spelling. Their familiarity with spelling improves their word recognition when reading.
Ask your student to write some sentence with a few words from this word family. Dictate words in phrases or sentences. If they misspell, ask about their grapheme choices. Refer back to what you’ve learned together.
You’re giving your dyslexic student the tools to apply to other unfamiliar words they run into down the road. That’s what it’s all about!
If you’d like the page above and the matrix sheet as well as a suggested outline, grab this free resource. Happy Spelling!