Remedial and Support Teachers' Association
of Queensland

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Developing the ability to read words in common word families

It has been suggested by a number of researchers in recent times, for example, Goswami (1994) that in teaching phonics, it is valuable to draw students' attention to the component parts of syllables referred to as onset and rime. For example, in the word cat, /c/ is the onset and /at/ is the rime. Orthographically, the onset is spelt as c and the rime as at. The advantage of this focus for teaching is that the 'vowel sounds within rimes are generally constant'. In contrast, where the sounds in words are analysed individually, the variance in pronunciation of the vowel sounds can be 'frustratingly unreliable'.

As well, Goswami (1994), amongst others, would argue that psychologically the rime is a more 'natural' unit for the learner to access. It appears that from an early age, students who have developed a concept of rhyme, can name words in a family given a key word. For example, given the word cat, many children can name rat, sat, fat, etc. It is only much later that students develop the ability to analyse words at the phoneme level. For example, to analyse the word had accurately, a student needs to know the sound/symbol relationships for /h/, /a/, /d/, say these sounds accurately, remember the sounds in sequence and then synthesise them correctly. Many students who have severe difficulties with phonological coding find such a complex analytical task extremely taxing, even after considerable training in phonological awareness tasks. In the word had for example, some students will hear /t/ rather than /d/ or a mixture and consequently may spell the word hadt or hatd.

For such students, it could be argued that after sufficient training in phonological tasks it would be profitable to focus on a limited number of rimes (families) as part of their training in phonics. This training needs to relate closely to the orthographic patterns, for example, -an which spells the rime /an/ (see list below). This practice should have beneficial effects on spelling as well as for reading.

For our teaching practice at Isolated Students' Programs, we have changed the list, deleting a number of the rimes, for example ic, while adding some that were not present on the original list. A table showing our modified list is presented below:

It was felt that the students experiencing extreme difficulties with learning would benefit from the teaching of the above. Other families could be added according to the needs and interests of individual students.

Michael Boyle