What Pete Said: An Essay

Pete Bowers, my good friend, spelling colleague, teacher par excellence, and all-around capital guy, has written a capital response to my last post about the search for proof of the value of etymological study. Like me, Pete is a spelling expert. Unlike me, Pete not only is a kind person; he actually comes off that way. Also unlike me, Pete is a very thoughtful and self-reflective teacher, one who studies the art and science and practice of teaching in ways I’m not capable of even thinking about. Moreover, and again, unlike me, Pete is personally engaged with the pedagogical research into classroom practices for literacy instruction. While I am off studying and writing word stories, Old English, syllable structure, graphemic histories, alphabetics, strong verbs, and other languagey stuff, Pete is actually doing, reading, and writing about pedagogical research, among his many other talents and practices.

What this all means is that if I were the kind of person to ask other people to do my research for me, Pete’s the guy I’d go to. He’s the person I would’ve asked to answer the question Jan Wasowicz posed about proving the value of etymological study, especially for students who struggle. Well, I didn’t ask him, but he did it in this spectacular comment anyhow. Rather than leave this essay to languish in the comments on my post, I want to highlight it here as a guest post. I’m leaving it in the comments, but I’m reprinting it here (with very minor edits) because it so deserves my teeny tiny spotlight.

I call this an ‘essay’ because of what ‘essay’ means. It’s not just a composition, not just a short piece of writing. Rather, it’s an effort, an attempt, a trial: originally a verb that meant, as Doug Harper writes, “to put to proof, test the mettle of.” This essay puts to proof the value of etymological study, and tests the mettle of pedagogical claims based not on what actually exists, but on what has been researched.

Over to you, Pete.

Let me start with this…

Instruction of the written word should accurately reflect how that writing system works.

It seems to me that the above is a key default assumption that we should draw on in the process of refining literacy instruction. Like any assumption, it should be challenged with empirical evidence. The field of linguistics has long established that English orthography is a system is one that evolved to represent the meaning of words for native speakers, and that it is influenced by an interrelation of morphological, etymological and phonological consideration. As oft cited linguist, Richard Venezky stated “English orthography is not a failed phonetic transcription system, invented out of madness or perversity. Instead, it is a more complex system that preserves bits of history (i.e., etymology), facilitates understanding, and also translates into sound.” (Venezky, 1999, P.4).

What logical conclusions should we draw if we accept the following assertions?

Barring compelling evidence to the contrary, literacy instruction is that should represent how the writing system works.

The description of English orthography as articulated by linguists such as Venezky (1967, 1970; 1999), C. Chomsky (1970) or N. Chomsky & Halle (1968) as an system for representing the meaning of words that involves the interrelation of morphology, etymology and phonology is the most coherent account we have regarding how English spelling works.

Since I accept these two premises, one conclusion I draw is that the the burden of providing evidence is on those that hypothesize that etymology should be avoided in literacy instruction, not on those that draw on etymological understandings to inform their instruction.

We saw a similar trajectory of research with regard to morphological instruction. In her seminal 1990 book “Beginning to Read” Adams analyzed an enormous amount of evidence supporting the finding that instruction that explicitly targeted phonological awareness and letter-sound correspondence was more effective than ‘whole word’ type instruction which avoided or demphasized the phonological influences on spelling. But Adams also presented a hypothesis for instruction about morphology. “Although teaching older readers about the roots [base morphemes] and suffixes of morphologically complex words may be a worthwhile challenge, teaching beginning or less skilled readers about them may be a mistake” (Adams, 1990, p. 152).

It is totally reasonable to propose a hypothesis to test. I don’t even argue that those who  put forward a hypothesis have the responsibility of testing it. They should offer evidence for their reasoning, but the scientific community has the responsibility of not drawing strong conclusions about practice without testing hypotheses. A decade later, major reviews like the National Reading Panel and others reconfirmed Adam’s findings about whole language vs. phonics type instruction, but failed to address the lack of research on questions about morphological instruction. As far as I know, the first time that a serious test of the hypothesis posited by Adams was two decades later. We know have three meta-analyses on morphological intervention studies (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010; 2013) and two systematic reviews (Reed, 2008; Carlisle, 2010). When the 1990 hypothesis recommending avoiding morphological instruction with less able and younger students was finally tested, not only was their not support for that hypothesis, the opposite turned out to be the case.

The evidence we have from those studies is that morphology instruction that has been tested benefits children in general, but in particular, the less able and younger gained the most.

We can now see that it would have been far more productive if we took on the assumption that instruction should accurately reflect how the writing system works from the beginning. If we had, we would have had two decades of research testing and refining how best to integrate instruction of morphology, phonology and etymology.

With this kind of history, I am very wary of the point of view that we need research evidence before it is appropriate to recommend teaching about etymology. Instead, I would argue, it is a much safer position to say we need research evidence before we have a basis to recommend avoiding etymology.

Fortunately, the research has moved on since these meta-analysis. Gina pointed to an article by Devonshire, Morris, & Fluck, 2013). As few teachers and tutors have access to such articles, let me paste in the abstract of that study:

“A novel intervention was developed to teach reading and spelling literacy to 5 to 7 year-old students using explicit instruction of morphology, etymology, phonology, and form rules. We examined the effects of the intervention compared to a phonics-based condition using a cross-over design with a baseline measure. One hundred and twenty children attending an English state funded primary school were randomly allocated either to a traditional phonics condition followed by the novel intervention, or to the novel intervention followed by the phonics condition. The novel intervention significantly improved the literacy skills of the children including both word reading and spelling compared with the phonics condition. We conclude that early teaching of English literacy should include instruction in morphology, etymology and rules about form in addition to traditional phonics. We suggest that the results of the study could inform future policy on the teaching of English literacy skills.”

See the full paper here:

https://files.realspellers.org/PetesFolder/Articles/Devonshire_Morris_Fluck_2013.pdf

Apologies if the above theoretical arguments are a bit esoteric. The research question is important, but for teachers and tutors who sense that it might be important to teach about etymology, they might wonder how on earth such a thing could be done!

I’ll end my overly-long comment with some very brief illustrations and links for more resources and ideas.

Etymology (diachronic and synchronic) is essential for being able to understand countless spellings that cannot be understood if we restrict instruction to phonologically based conventions in isolation of morphological and etymological considerations.

When we teach phonological cues to spelling in isolation of other linguistic factors, homophones become a problem. We can only assume that words that sound the same should be spelled the same. But of course any assembling of evidence of homophones shows the opposite to be the case. Thus Venezky refers to a “homophone principle” in his 1999 book. Where two words can have the same pronunciations, where possible they will be spelled differently to mark that difference in meaning. Thus with one etymological concept — the homophone principle, we can drop the false assumption that  homophones are confusing because they are spelled the same.

Then we can go farther and look at particular homophones such as to, too, and two. First we see that they should be spelled differently. But why that surprising <w> in <two> for the number? Well, once we focus on relationships between meaning and spelling we can generate a set of words such as: twice, twenty, between, twin etc., and learn about a spelling structure called an “etymological marker letter”. The <w> in <two> is not there as a grapheme representing a phoneme. It is there simply because it has been successful in informing readers that this is the spelling for the number. With that concept, we might be able to make sense of the <o> in <people>, when a question about that letter now sparks us to think about words like popular, population and other words from this etymological family.

Etymology in Grade 1
If you would like to see an example of this type of instruction in a classroom, here is a video a teacher friend took when I taught about homophones and function and content (lexical) words in a Grade 1 class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGeq05fzBUU

For an example of the more familiar diachronic etymology — the kind about the root origin of words — here are a couple of other classroom videos for you to consider:

Etymology in Grade 5
a) I love this introductory lesson by Dan Allen in a Grade 5 where he just presents text and asks his students to present hypotheses about which word might be related by roots based on cues of spelling and meaning.

https://blogs.zis.ch/dallen/category/languagespellingword-study/page/2/

With those questions, his students begin a journey of diving into references like www.etymonline.com  as an everyday sort of activity to develop and test hypotheses about the spellings and meanings of words.

I had the pleasure of working in Dan Allen’s class in the fall. I use that opportunity to introduce the concept of what I think of as the “structure and meaning test”. In order to understand the nature of the spelling-meaning relationships in words, we can use this process to determine which words share just an etymological relationship, or if they also share a morphological relationship by sharing the same base element. See the video of that lesson here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC7brXsfa2I See more on this “structure and meaning test” here:

https://www.realspellers.org/resources/lesson-plans/795-the-structure-meaning-test?highlight=WyJzdHJ1Y3R1cmUiLCJtZWFuaW5nIiwic3RydWN0dXJlIG1lYW5pbmciXQ==

The first thing for teachers to do before they can actually draw any conclusions of their own about etymological instruction is to dive into understanding the topic themselves first. Certainly one of the best ways I can think of to do that is to take part in Gina and Doug’s Etymology lll conference. Also take their LEXinars. Working with Gina and Doug continually moves my own understanding — and therefore my practice — forward.

12 Comments

  1. Rebecca Loveless says:

    Thank you, Pete and Gina. Every time I read your powerful explanations on this topic, I feel a little better able to explain them myself to the people who need to hear them. And of course, this informs my own understanding more deeply, too.

  2. Liisa Freure says:

    Very well written and thoughtful response. Once you begin to investigate the layers of our language with students, those “aha” moments become frequent – both for teacher and student! Thank you for access to this article as well – I have been looking for it!

  3. Kris Clark says:

    Although I totally agree with Pete, I must say that I very much sympathize with a call for research. As educators, we have so many times been told that a particular way is better, only to have later research prove it wrong. Whole language instruction of course being one of the glaring examples of this. As teachers, we are always told that we must used research-based practices, so I understand asking where the research is to support any suggested teaching formats. However, I do not know the backstory here, and Gina’s post leads me to believe that there is more to this story. At any rate, Pete, it is good to here some of the research because it confirms what my gut tells me.

    • Kris, no one is saying that research isn’t important, but more important than pedagogical research is a factual understanding of what it is that we’re teaching. Both Pete and I said in our posts that there *is* research, and we both listed the names of many researchers who have contributed to the understanding of etymology and its study for children. You make a very significant point when you articulate that “we have so many times been told that a particular way is better, only to have later research prove it wrong.” EXACTLY! Research can be very fickle like that — it happens in medicine, nutrition, etc. But here’s something no amount of research can disprove: the English writing system is organized by and reflects etymological relationships between words, both synchronically and diachronically. That’s a fact, and no new study will ever come out saying, “Oh, no, wait, we were wrong. English doesn’t do that after all.”

    • Peter Bowers says:

      Hey Kris,

      Perhaps I don’t need to add anything here as Gina has already responded — I felt obliged to pass on a quick comment given your first sentence beginning with the word “although”.

      I hope that my post is not taken in any way to suggest that I am against further research! As your final sentence points out, you see that I do emphasize the role of research. A key point I’m trying to make is that we have to be careful about what conclusions we should and should not draw based on the research we have. I sense in the previous discussion the idea that “Since we don’t yet have research demonstrating the effects of teaching about etymology, we shouldn’t do it yet.” I’m suggesting that if we accept the default position of that our instruction should reflect how the writing system works, we will find that we can’t avoid teaching about etymology.

      I am very pleased that people like Marcia Henry have been pointing to morphology and etymology for decades, and that people like Victoria Devonshire have researched teaching the interrelation of morphology, etymology and phonology and compared it to teaching a phonics based program. I just don’t want to make the mistake we made with morphology, and keep waiting for people to do research before we see that the more sense our instruction makes of spelling — the more children are able to make sense of the written word.

      To take it to the extreme, imagine a teacher with linguistic understanding of orthography before we had all these meta-analyses about morphological instruction. Her teacher resource calls DOES an irregular spelling. But she knows that this word can be analyzed with the word sum DO + ES –> DOES, and that with this beginning, she can draw attention to its relatives DOING and DONE in a matrix. She can then draw a comparison to parallel family of the base GO with its relatives GOING, GOES, GONE. In this way she can introduce her children to the established linguistic fact that we don’t know the pronunciation of a morpheme like the base DO until it is in a word.

      I cannot imagine making the argument that until there is research evidence that morphological instruction is effective this teacher should teach DOES as an irregular word to memorize. Similarly, if teachers are finding that drawing on etymological understanding is engaging their students interest in the written word, I don’t accept the argument that they should wait for research on etymological instruction before they have the justification to use it. And while teachers around the world dive into teaching with etymology, and develop their understanding and their practice, when researchers find ways to test the effect, they will have the benefit of teachers who have been refining their practice for years. They will have better instruction to research!

      I’m convinced that the only thing that makes my own contribution to the reading research world have particular value is that I came to it with an understanding of orthography and how it can be taught. Practice can influence research just as research can influence practice.

  4. Deborah Sensel-Davis says:

    Gina and Pete,
    After using your teachings and my own explorations in tutoring my O-G students for the last few years, I don’t understand how anyone can NOT use etymology and morphology in teaching our English writing system. The Germanic “heart” of our language – the things we hold “nearest and dearest to our hearts” is how I label it for my students – is so eloquent both in orthography and in shades of meaning, that I can’t imagine ignoring it. My youngest, most decoding/encoding-challenged students have come to love those “strong” “Viking” verbs, and homophones make all the sense in the world when you illuminate the “why”. Adding little tiny morphemes, like building blocks snapping together, creates “gigantic” words that are no longer mysterious, yet reveal their complexity so easily. My “challenged” students shine most brightly when they are able to clearly explain in front of an entire class, just why a spelling rule works so perfectly. There’s no going back for this word nerd.

  5. Pete, Gina, thanks for this–elegantly written. I am reminded of so many examples from my own classes to support what Pete says here. Just last week, we explored the etymology of both “two” and “one” and their relatives. How else would these words be explained? (The answer, of course: they wouldn’t. Hence endless lists of “tricky” words). And without the possibility of understanding, what motivation is there?

    Most obvious to me therefore, and perhaps harder to quantify: engagement. Students who are given access to the full story of the writing system, rather than one third of it, are most willing to accept that the system is logical and understandable. They are not–from ages 5 and onward, in my experience–deterred by the reality that the system is complex, because they are given the tools to access that complexity.

    I had a 6 year-old student, just beginning to read and write, and for whom Arabic was his first language, who came to me and said, “Mr. Caldwell, I have seen this word spelled ‘o.k.’ and “okay’–which one is right?” I (wrongly) thought I knew the answer, but I didn’t have to. He was able to do the research himself through Doug Harper’s amazing dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=OK&allowed_in_frame=0 The etymology of this word is fascinating one, but even that is not the point–of this comment, or for Ahmed. The point was that there was a story in that word. And knowing that left him wanting more.

    When did a student exclusively exposed to phonics ever ask for more?

    • lynnheasley says:

      And you know I just went rushing onto the etymonline site to check out okay or rather OK. What a story. Can’t wait to share this one with my adult literacy client 🙂

  6. Kris says:

    Yikes! I am already on board. I was just empathize because I know what the field of education is like. I also cannot imagine going back, and think about words in The shower now! It is crazy. I just don’t want to pick on anyone who is not there yet.

  7. Peter Bowers says:

    Just had to link to this video of two 6-year-olds joyfully diving into the story book of words called “Etymonline” to explore the family of words related to CARNIVORE in Lyn and Jim Anderson’s Grade 1 classroom. While your at Lyn’s blog, keep exploring. So much to gain from her amazing work. Here’s the link to her post with that video: https://wordsinbogor.blogspot.ca/2015/04/a-video-of-deep-understanding.html

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