OnTrack Reading

I’ve done a little revising of some of the pages of this Guide to Overcoming Your Child’s Reading Problems to accommodate the readers who find this site while searching for a source of word lists.

I have but one request of those of you who use the word lists you find here. Please read the page of the Guide titled My Take on Dyslexia before you leave. I sincerely believe that the information you find there will, if you are able to follow up on it, enable you to help most struggling readers in a way that most of you never realized even existed.

In fact, disseminating the information on that page (see the Table of Contents on the sidebar to get a feel for the Guide’s organization) is the reason this site was constructed.

Now, as to word lists, if you have searched the lists on this site under the section Comprehensive Word Lists (down at the end of the Table of Contents) and not found the list you need, just leave a comment here and I will find it and try to generate the list and post it on the site.

I have a 7,000 word database of words selected from a children’s dictionary which has each word broken down in the database by sound and symbol, as well as number of sounds and number of syllables, and can fairly easily generate a new list from it.

For example, if you want a list of the words in the database that end in the suffix “ture” it’s easy to generate. If it turns out that the list you request is too short to bother posting permanently, or too limited in potential interest to others, I’ll just provide it in the comment section on this page, but I should be able to get it to you one way or the other.

Here’s a link back to Comprehensive Word Lists.

Today I added the spellings of the /v/ sound and the /ng/ sound to the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling. That completes the consonant word lists that I intend to post.

If anyone wants a particular list run off, feel free to post a request and I’ll see what I can do with it. Comments are a little hard for you to follow around in here due to the present format, but I can easily find any comment no matter what page you leave it on, so don’t worry, I will get you request.

Examples of the sort of searches that are possible would be: 1) List all words in the database ending with “ture”, 2) List all words ending with “ic”, 3) List all words with the digraph “oo” or 4)List all 2-syllable words with /ee/ sounds spelled “i”.

Actually most of the above requests could probably be found in the existing word lists if you go to the Page Comprehensive Word Lists, but if you can’t find what you want, leave a request and I’ll try to run it. Just remember, the database only has 7,000 words taken from a children’s dictionary, so there will always be words not on the lists.

The Comprehensive Word Lists section on the sidebar now has the word lists for various spellings of the /m/ sound added to the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

Posting here has been infrequent lately because I’ve been trying to prepare the Advanced Code Workbook that I have used with my clients for the past several years to be published by an on-demand printer. This would enable people to go directly to the printer’s website and order a copy of the workbook. I’m intending to post the instructions here in the form of a PDF, and probably also in the form of a series of Pages in the Guide on the sidebar (for those who are reluctant to download PDF files.) I might also send a copy of the instructions to the printer so a hard copy could be ordered along with the workbook itself, but first I have to be satisfied that the workbook product itself will be satisfactory.

But more on all that later. Here again is the location of the /m/ word lists: Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

I’ve finished adding six new PDF files of word lists for the spellings of the /sh/ sound to the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

In the OnTrack Reading curriculum, the sound /sh/ is explicitly taught as having six spellings, the most common one, sh, plus ch in words like chef, and then four spellings that share the common characteristics of all being digraphs ending with the letter i and all representing the /sh/ sound in the middle of words, never at the beginning or end. These four spellings are ti, ci, si and ssi with examples being patient, special, mansion and mission.

Another curricular approach would be to teach suffixes like tion, cion, sion and ssion, and this might be the best way to go if words like special and patient didn’t also come into play, because then the number of suffixes grows to a point where a child is being asked to do more or less the equivalent of memorizing whole words, a strategy that has disastrous effects when used as a primary reading strategy at the outset.

I’ve used this approach for six or seven years now, after first trying the suffix-oriented approach, and in my opinion this one works much better, plus it’s consistent with the sound-by-sound decoding approach that I use in the rest of the curriculum.

Incidentally, there are a lot of ways to spell the /sh/ sound and the word lists cover most of them. However, I could only locate two words int the 7,000-word database using ce for /sh/ (ocean and licorice) and two using sci (conscience and conscious) so there are no lists for those two spellings. I realize there are other examples, but they didn’t make the children’s dictionary I used to create the database.

The word lists for the /sh/ spelling are currently at the very bottom of the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

The Word Lists for the consonant sound /n/ have now been added to the bottom of the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

One value of these word lists is, I think, that you gain an appreciation for how common any particular spelling of a sound turns out to be. For instance, I was somewhat surprised to find that the number of words with the gn spelling of the /n/ sound was so short. Remember, the database contains about 7,000 words taken from a children’s dictionary, so that short list is about all they’re going to run into for a while anyway.

Also, please note my treatment of the ne spelling. There are already a lot of ending digraphs which have the letter e at the end, such as ge, ce and ve, so the approach I’ve taken in the OnTrack Reading curriculum is to always treat the split-vowel situations (a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e and u-e) as representing just one sound for decoding purposes. This, however, means that a way must found to explain a words like gone, some and infinite. I’ve chosen to treat the ne, me and te in those words as ending consonant spellings. Children readily accept this and it has the advantage of training them to always first try the split vowel construct to see if they recognize the word, and only then to fall back on a different vowel sound and an ending consonant digraph.

By the way, I said yesterday that without vision problems most kids would just learn to read and word lists, cute tricks, etc., would not be necessary instructional tools. I should have added that I believe this would be the case because once the vision-challenged are taken out of the mix, we would find that a decent phonics program would work for everyone, so a decent phonics program would, in fact, actually be utilized. As many of you know, this is not always the case in today’s classrooms. I wanted to clarify that, as I don’t want to sound like reading is something that kids naturally “pick up.” It does still have to be taught.

Again the Page with the new word lists for the consonant sound /n/ is Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

Word lists for the various spellings of the /f/ sound have been added to the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

It contains one list that treats ugh as a spelling of /f/ in six words (and their derivatives,) those being laugh, cough, rough, tough, trough and enough. This is a relatively trivial matter, but the reasons for doing so are discussed at the bottom of that particular word list. As explained there, the alternative is to treat the digraph gh as representing two sounds, the /g/ in ghost and the /f/ in rough. There are disadvantages in doing so, as detailed in the explanation.

Once I get the consonant word lists completed, I’m intending to refocus on the vision side of things as I believe that vision problems and “dyslexia” as we understand it are inextricably linked and this is the far more important area to investigate. In fact, dyslexia wasn’t so common, I suspect all of the focus on word lists would disappear. People would just learn to read. Word lists are just one more work-around that we utilize in our quest to help kids learn how English is structured. But we are more or less forced to take these steps because the dyslexics infer so little information about print on their own. Essentially, we’re getting the cart before the horse in much of what we do in reading instruction, I think.

But enough on that. Here again is the link to the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling. The four lists of /f/ spellings are currently at the bottom of that Page.

The Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling now has an extensive collection of word lists covering the various spellings of the /g/ and the /j/ sounds.

The /g/ and /j/ sounds are listed together because of the overlap of the letter g which can be the /g/ sound in words like grab and got as well as the /j/ sound in words like gem and gist.

In the OnTrack Reading curriculum, a Rule of g is only obliquely referenced because it is not as reliable as the Rule of c. Nonetheless, a very similar pattern does occur and it involves the same trailing vowel letters, e, i and y. While I will teach every client, no matter how young, the Rule of c once they get into longer multisyllable words, I rarely get into anything like a Rule of g except with some of the older clients (5th grade and up or so) who might be more likely to deal with the inconsistencies encountered.

Besides, teaching the digraphs ge and dge for the sound /j/ goes a long ways toward training the concept that the letter g usually represents the /j/ sound in front of the letter e and that is the most prevalent situation covered by the “rule” anyway.

Again, the Consonant Sounds by Spelling word lists are at the bottom of the Guide on the Sidebar.

New word lists for consonant sounds can be found on the Guide Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling. For now, the Word List section of the Guide is at the bottom of the Sidebar’s Table of Contents, so you have to scroll down the Sidebar quite a ways to find it if you don’t use the link here.

In the OnTrack Reading curriculum, vowel sounds are clustered together for instructional purposes when there are overlaps of pronunciation. For example, all of the /ow/ spellings, ou, ow and ough, can also be /oe/ spellings, so it makes sense to teach /ow/ and /oe/ one after the other. Clients then easily see the relationship between the two sounds and their spellings.

Similar overlaps in pronunciation also occur in the consonant sounds. There is some overlap, for example, between the /s/ and /z/ sound where the letter s and the digraphs se and ss can represent either a /s/ or a /z/ sound in different words.

So, the consonants are organized first by sound, and within each sound, all of the common spellings of that sound have word lists. Nearby that group of lists will be any other group of lists which have spellings which overlap with the first group. Take a look at the Page to at Consonant Sounds by Spelling to see what I mean. It’s easier to understand by just looking at the titles of the word lists.

The word lists containing 2-syllable, 3-syllable and 4-syllable words organized by vowel sounds are done. Today I’ve added the last five PDF files covering the /oul/ (as in could), /oy/, /aw/ and /err/ (as in merry) sounds plus the /u/ sound spelled with the digraph ou. They are all located in the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

I’ll start on the consonant sounds next, and they will come in handy because I need to generate a list of words using the markers ck, tch, dge, dg and x for the Junior High Phonics Course that I’ve started laying out in the Guide.

On another note, I was browsing various websites to see how they handled vowel sounds and I couldn’t help notice how many curricula have been designed which seem to have lost sight of the fact that reading and writing are tools, and not an end in themselves. It appears to me that hours of valuable class time would be wasted if students were being asked to spend time on many of the activities of the sort described on the sites I visited.

I firmly believe that we best learn how to use a tool when we use it for the purpose it was intended. Yes, we need to understand the intricacies of a tool well enough to maintain and use it properly, but we do not need to study the tool itself in depth. We need, instead, to use the tool for the purpose it was intended. When it comes to reading curricula, it almost seems as if we spend more time studying a word and how it is put together, how it looks, how it feels, etc., than we do using the word productively. Words exist to convey meaning, and we need to get right to that as soon as students understand their rudimentary construction.

This is why, I think, the Spalding Method is such an effective language curriculum. It gets to the meat of the matter in a hurry, while overlooking none of the essentials for understanding the tools themselves. But it doesn’t get lost in the tools. Once letters and sounds are understood, and words are constructed based upon them, the curriculum gets down to the business of writing and reading, and in that order, writing before reading. In that way, writing and reading take their rightful place in a child’s mind as a tool for conveying meaning.

But enough of that. The completed word lists organized by the nineteen vowel sounds in the OnTrack Reading curriculum are here on the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

The Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable now has word lists added in the form of PDF files for the /ue/ and /oo/ vowel sounds, leaving only a few sounds to go.

I’ve also been spending time building the information on the Junior High Phonics Course that I described in yesterday’s post, but I’ll add a separate daily post to cover that later today.

Just to illustrate a use for the vowel sound word lists I’ve been adding to the site over the last few weeks, I’m now using them to pick out words that are suitable for use at various stages in the Junior High Phonics Course. Because the word lists are organized by basic code consonant spellings first and then advanced code consonant spellings, it is easy to find words that are decodable using only the Main Rule that I’ve introduced so far.

What would be a formidable task of finding several dozen multisyllable words to use that contain only basic code consonant spellings and vowel spellings was made simple just by examining words on the first five word lists covering the /a/e/i/o/u/ sounds.

All of the vowel sound lists are on the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.