• Rhyming word families help to make sense of the English writing system.
  The English writing system does not lend itself to broadly generalized phonics guidelines, but it is not totally arbitrary either. One way that a learner can make sense of the system is to learn it as a set of overlapping and partially contradictory spelling patterns that have developed during the history of written English. This is how rhyming word families portray the system. MEAT and MEET may be pronounced the same way, but they are in two different spelling patterns.

For every pattern of this kind, there is a word family. By learning rhyming word families, a student is learning phonics guidelines which actually reflect the historical reality of the English writing system. These are phonics guidelines which create some degree of order out of the apparent chaos of English spelling, without portraying more consistency than actually exists.

Dealing with Conflicting Patterns

By not portraying more consistency than actually exists in the English writing system, rhyming word families introduce learners to the sad truths of English spelling relatively early. Even so, within each rhyming word family, there are consistent letter-speech sound correspondences. It is natural for a beginning learner, just starting to work on word families, to begin hoping for more consistency in English spelling than there actually is. Then, at some point, the learner will make the disillusioning discovery that the rhyme in a rhyming word family can be spelled in different ways.

Several of the experienced staff people that I spoke with during the Sounding Out Words Project stressed that it was important for tutors and facilitators to deal with a student’s thoughts and feelings at this disillusioning moment. Claudia plans ahead for this moment. This is how she describes what she does:

You move into a different stage then, by looking at the differences, as opposed to the similarities in sound. So, if they’ve hit that point of confusion, I try and suggest, "Okay, maybe at your next lesson, you’ll go and look at the differences, and just marvel at them for a while. Don’t necessarily try and learn them all." You know, and that usually leads to a good bitch session about the English language not saying exactly what it means. Then we start looking at the ways that a spelling can sound, and check out the differences. You’ll usually start with something like TOUGH or THOUGH and place them in different spots on the chart, so you can look at it and say, "Okay, look, it’s not just you that’s confused." You know, "The English language is confused."