What's Wrong With 'Word Families'?

 

            Q. In many classrooms, for spelling, beginning readers are taught how words fit together in families because they look and sound like each other. Examples: "goat, boat, float," "pig, big, jig" and "sheep, jeep, beep." Teaching children lists of related words would seem to be a good strategy to help them mentally organize correct spellings and word meanings. Are "word families" a good idea?

 

            Unfortunately, no. They waste time and "dumb down" reading for most of the student population. Too often, teachers strain for unusual, low-frequency words - like "jig," above - that readers rarely encounter, just to fill out a "word family." Also, reading instruction that is based on memorizing patterns of letters within words is limiting, not liberating.

            Instead of simply decoding an unfamiliar word from left to right, using the rules of systematic, intensive, explicit phonics, the child can only search it for a memorized pattern from "word family" training. If it doesn't fit in the "word families" that have been taught, the child is pretty much stuck.

            To prevent that from happening, this strategy of reading instruction is always tied to workbooks with controlled vocabularies and so-so or downright awful quality of storytelling because the writing is contrived to fit into the "word families" that are being taught. It's an overly expensive way of teaching reading, since with a pure phonics approach, you can use existing library books and don't have to have special curriculum at all.

            With "word family" instruction, when the child encounters an unfamiliar word, the child is trained to put the word mentally into a "word family" in order to discern its meaning. He or she looks at the beginning of the word, the end of the word, back to the beginning to sound it out, and then from the word to surrounding words to try to figure out the meaning, and maybe up to the illustration and back . . . as you can see, this wastes time, easily leads to visual perception problems and is ineffective and confusing.

            It's much wiser to concentrate spelling instruction on the rules of spelling, and use high-frequency words found in the Extended Ayres List. That's a set of 1,700 words found to account for 85% of the words that students need in daily speaking, writing and reading. The Extended Ayres List is grouped in levels of difficulty for beginning readers on up to post-high school. It forms the basis of many spelling programs available on the market today for a fraction of the cost of a "word family" approach.

            Teaching the spelling rules and how they apply to high-frequency words: that's the way to develop independent readers quickly and efficiently. It puts less stress and strain on the teacher for planning purposes, too. You don't have to remember which "word families" you've taught - just the spelling rules, and the words the children are most likely to be reading.