How does my child know what letters to use ...

Question

When it comes to spelling a given word and that word could be spelt using any number of (phonograms / blends / digraphs) how does my child decide which one to use? ie O (o, oa, oe, oo, ou, ow, ough ) so boat could be spelt ( bote, boat, boet, bout, bowt, bought) of course here I have just used the O as an example but this dilemma is true for any sound that has multiple (phonograms / blends / digraphs) that make the require sound.

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

Mark Paul Brendhow does my child decide which one to use?

I think you mean "How should my child decide which one to use?"

The answer is that such a decision cannot be made for the English language. English is not written phonetically. Instead, we learn spelling by reading. The word must be seen in written form many times, concurrent with hearing the sound of the word, before we can write the word with its correct spelling. While it may be useful to know, for example, that O may be spelled 'oa', 'ow', and several other ways, this in itself does no good when trying to spell 'boat' (or is it 'bowt'?) or 'snow' (or is it 'snoa'?). The only way to know is to have formed an association between the written form 'boat' and the sound of the word 'boat', and so on. Children learn the association by learning to read, and, to a lesser extent, by being read to when they have a written text they can try to follow along with.

After a few years the child may have enough experience to find it interesting to know such things as the fact that 'oa' usually occurs in the middle of a word, while 'ow' usually occurs at the end of a word. Such general principles are usually only interesting curiosities, however, and not very helpful in the first stages of reading and spelling.

CJ

How does my child know what letters to use ...

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