Super Word Families

From FreeReading

Super word families is a FreeReading concept that means: word families that students need to learn separately from regular- and regularish-word decoding. There are seven super word families:

• -air as in air, chair, fair, hair, pair
• -are as in care, scare, share
• -ead as in bread, dead, head, read, thread (but note read with the regular ea sound rhyming with reed)
• -ear as in dear, ear, hear, near, tear, year
• -ind as in find, kind, mind, wind (but note wind with the regular i sound)
• -ook as in book, brook, cook, hook, look, shook, took
• -ore as in more, shore, store, wore.

The rest of this article explains how the super word families were determined. Kessler and Treiman (2001) list spelling patterns for monosyllabic words in which the coda (the part of the word immediately after the vowel) consistently alters the vowel sound. For instance, the most-common sound of the letters ai is the sound in wait but that sound is altered when followed by the letter r as in chair. Whether this exception is worth teaching depends on how many words likely to be encountered in print by the student it applies to. Kessler and Treiman list air, chair, fair, hair, pair. They go on to calculate the statistical significance of whether the coda affects the vowel sound more than if codas were randomly shuffled. The vowel-coda combinations they identify that meet that criterion (and so may be worth teaching as exceptions) are:

• -ail as in jail, mail, nail, pail, sail, tail, trail
• -air as in air, chair, fair, hair, pair
• -all as in all, ball, call, fall, hall, small, tall, wall
• -ange as in change, strange
• -ar as in bar, car, far, jar, star
• -ard as in card, guard, hard, yard
• -are as in care, scare, share
• -arge as in charge, large
• -ark as in bark, dark, mark, park
• -arm as in arm, farm
• -art as in art, cart, part, smart, start
• -ead as in bread, dead, head, read, thread (but note read with the regular ea sound rhyming with reed)
• -ear as in dear, ear, hear, near, tear, year
• -ild as in child, wild
• -ind as in find, kind, mind, wind (but note wind with the regular i sound)
• -o as in do, to, two, who
• -old as in cold, fold, gold, hold, old, sold, told
• -oll as in roll, troll
• -ome as in come, some
• -on as in son, won
• -ong as in long, song, strong, wrong
• -ook as in book, brook, cook, hook, look, shook, took
• -oor as in door, floor
• -or as in for, nor, or
• -ore as in more, shore, store, wore
• -orn as in born, corn
• -ought as in bought, brought, thought
• -oup as in group, soup
• -ull as in bull, full, pull
• -ush as in bush, push (but note brush and rush with the regular u sound)

Now, if we assume a student has been taught decoding following a system such as FreeReading, so that he or she already knows how to decode regular words (and also assume that we don't want to use word families to give the student extra practice in decoding) then of these 31 we can remove several:

• Those that can be correctly decoded by a student who knows the most common sounds for letter combinations such as ar, al and or
• Those that are not frequently occurring enough to teach as exceptions
• Those whose sound is only marginally different from the regular sound such as -ong as in long and -ull as in pull
• Those that occur primarily in high-frequency irregular words that have already been taught such as -o as in do and to

That leaves the seven patterns listed at the top of this article as the most valuable word families to teach students who can decode regular words, letter combinations, and high-frequency irregular words. We call these the super word families. Interestingly, only the last two of these families appear in Wylie and Durrell's (1970) widely used list.