A Significant Sign
Why is there a <g> in ‘sign’?
While attending a Dyslexia-For-A-Day simulation, I had a watershed moment when Dr. Kelli Sandman-Hurley asked, “Why is there a <g> in ‘sign’?” That question grabbed my attention. Haven’t you wondered that too?
The room was full of reading teachers and tutors as well as parents. ‘Sign’ was on all our sight word lists, but no one could answer her question.
What do you think of when you hear the word ‘sign’? It could be a street sign, a poster, an exit sign. It could be the action of signing your name, signing using sign language, or giving someone the thumbs-up.
Usually sight word lists are words with a challenging spelling that we can’t just sound out. Students are often told they’ll need to write it over and over and memorize it. Memorizing spelling is not easy for many of our students.
What if you could explain the spelling to students?
Wouldn’t it be helpful to have a memorable way for them to understand this word?
Word Families Teach Meaning & Spelling Connections
Dr. Kelli then mentioned relatives of ‘sign’ in a word family based on meaning and spelling. Huh? Word families in reading or phonics programs are usually rhyming words with the same spelling such as ‘bat, cat, hat, that’ or ‘rain, brain, gain, drain, main’. Same final spelling and final pronunciation (rime). Not related in meaning, just rhyming.
Our English word ‘sign’ came from a Latin noun signum that means “identifying mark, indication, symbol”. The Latin verb signare has the “meaning of mark, designate, distinguish.”
I learned that a meaningful word family is a group of words that share a base spelling and a shared meaning. Her short list of the ‘sign’ word family included ‘signal, designer, signature, significant’.
Wow! I had never made the connection between ‘sign’ or ‘significant’ or ‘designer’. Then we talked about what ‘sign’ could mean in those words.
A signal is a sign like a blinking turn signal, a flashing stoplight, or a waving hand motion from a friend. It’s a sign to do or not do something, or that something is about to happen.
A designer is someone who designs-art, architecture, processes, programs, etc. Their design is presented as their “mark” of what they want to achieve and how to accomplish it.
A signature could be described as making one’s mark on a document, which in earlier times could be just making an X.
A Word Family Teaches Phonology
Then we explored the phonology of the <g> in the meaningful word family. Rather than starting with sounding out, we started with the meaning of the word and the word family. But this word family packs a punch in teaching phonology, the correspondence between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds).
In a guided exploration of this word family, students would discover that <s> can be /s/ or /z/ as in ‘sign’ and ‘design’.
The <i> in ‘sign’ and ‘signal’ present both the /aɪ/ (long-I) and /ɪ/ (short-I) phonemes. The <g> can be /∅/ “silent, unpronounced” as it is in ‘sign, design’ or /g/ in ‘signal, signature’. The symbols in // slanted lines are International Phonetic Alphabet-IPA symbols.
Schwa, the unstressed vowel phoneme, is there with the <a> in ‘signal’ or the first <e> in ‘designer’. What about the /tʃ/ (ch) phoneme in ‘signature’? There’s no <ch> consonant digraph so what’s spelling that sound?
<T> can spell /tʃ/ (ch) when it’s followed by a <u> as in ‘nature, factual, and fortune’. Most often <t> spells /t/ when followed by <u> such as in ‘tub, stuck, tube, tuna’ but it’s helpful to know it can spell /tʃ/. signature /sɪg nə tʃɚ/
The <SIGN> Word Family Teaches Vocabulary
Think of the vocabulary building that occurs with a meaningful word family. What is a designer? How might we use ‘significant’ or ‘signify’ in sentences?
As much as I learned about dyslexia from that seminar, it was a significant sign of change to come. Change in my understanding and my students’ understanding.
Honestly, it was like staring at puzzle pieces and not seeing the one you need and then boom, you see it. The spelling and meaning connections in the <sign> word family made my day.
Students have appreciated learning that English spelling really doesn’t have gobs of exceptions. Exploring word families with structured word inquiries has helped us find the reasons behind the spelling. Together we learned how to use word sums like sign + al –> signal pulling morphemes from a matrix.
You don’t have to be a linguist to learn and explain why there is an unpronounced <g> in ‘sign’. I’m not a linguist, but I study words everyday.
Working with students on reading, spelling, and writing requires understanding how our language works. That understanding grows every time a student asks a question. Their confidence in their abilities is growing too. That is a significant sign.
Sign + i + fic + ant –> significant