Homeroom has Laidlaw Brothers spelling. One assignment is choosing the stressed syllables. I have not done this in reading. How important is it to know?
Re: stressed syllables
Victoria,thank you very much. I think I will have my child skip this part of the lesson as it would be too confusing now. Does the check and double check series go over this? Thanks so much for your quick response.
Re: stressed syllables
The C & DC series doesn’t get into stress much — as I said, stress is a more advanced and rather technical topic; much harder than it looks on the surface — for example explain the difference between the noun “a permit” and the verb “to permit” and why.
I remember doing dictionary work and stresses and all that in a strong academic program Grades 6-8, which is the next level up after C&DC. (You can read and spell very well with only an informal knowledge of stresses).
You can explain stressed and unstressed syllables *orally* with common examples like “elephant” and “Dakota” etcetera. It’s a worthwhile concept to have in the back of the mind and does reduce confusion over spelling of unstressed vowels when you realize you are not supposed to hear them.
My personal opinion of most of the exercises in most spelling books is that they are actively counterproductive, not only not teaching spelling but actively teaching people a great distaste for anything that looks like a spelling book — tiring and repetitive without drilling anything transferrable. I avoid them as much as possible.
Stressed and unstressed syllables make up one of the classic difficulties of English.
Basically every word has one stressed syllable which is in speech louder, longer, and clearer than the others (if any). There may also be secondary stresses in long words, complicating things further.
The stressed syllable(s) is/are the only ones that have full, clearly pronounced vowels.
In unstressed syllables, the vowels fall tho the general “schwa” or “muttered vowel” — the second e and the a in “elephant” for example.
There are two general approaches to teaching this — the absolutely exact and technically correct approach, and the Keep It Simple approach. If you are teaching university linguistics, the technically correct approach is absolutely necessary. If you are teaching six-year-olds, the only appropriate method is Keep It Simple — they have enough to hurdles to overcome in learning to read anyway, so why add unneccessary ones and risk adding confusion? For beginners, it’s better to just tell them “Well, when we’re talking fast of course we just say “uh”, but when we spell the word we have to remember it’s an “ah”.
IF a student in middle school has a good grounding in basic and intermediate phonics and is ready to go further, then introducing some more technical details is appropriate. I assume this is the goal of the author of your spelling program.
The point is that if we sound out every syllable exactly according to the rules, we don’t get the way the word is pronounced in real life. So going from sounding-out reading to accurate normal pronunciation requires using our oral language skills to find the appropriate stressed syllable: ell - eh - fant — oh, elephant (pronunced Elluffunt) On the other hand, going from speech to spelling, we have to learn *which* vowels in the unstressed syllables got dropped to schwas. This is one of the difficult parts of spelling and is worth working on.
Beginners don’t get too worried about these things if you don’t, but logic does bother middle schoolers and it is worthwhile to help them work through the finer points — assuming that they already have the foundation skills to deal with syllables, stresses, long and short vowels, and silent letters. If they don’t have these skills first, the lesson will go right over their heads and probably cause more misconceptions.