S3 E17 - Do Nonsense Words have a Place in Upper Primary?

One of the points of contention in adopting a structured approach to teaching literacy is nonsense words . These words , which are deliberately constructed to not be real words , are also known as non-words , alien words and pseudo-words . They contain allowable orthographic patterns or spelling patterns that mirror real words , but they don't mean anything .

Examples are "pom hath and spame . Most teachers of early years reading who are using a systematic synthetic phonics program are familiar with nonsense words , but teachers in years three to six may not be across their purpose or how to get the best out of them . This week , I held a live group coaching for school leaders .

These leaders are working with their teams to build structured literacy practices across their schools . Part of a shift in focus has been the introduction of nonsense words , and their teams are a little worried about the impact of them . Worries include things like, if we use nonsense words , will they start appearing in student writing ?

Won't the nonsense words take over real words in children's memory ? Does it really make sense to use words that don't mean anything, surely that's a waste of time ? Don't the nonsense words just make it harder for our students who have poor memories and vocabularies to learn and perform on assessment ?

For those of us who have been on the bus for a while , these questions might be hard to understand , but for people wading their way through the whole internet of information and let's be honest , misinformation , they're an understandable worry . The primary role of nonsense words is assessment , plain and simple .

We aren't teaching nonsense words, we are using them to assess student ability to tackle unknown words for both reading and spelling . I'll say that again: we aren't teaching nonsense words, we are using them as part of assessment .

The reason they're so important is that they help us know whether a student can decode and encode , or read and spell words that are unfamiliar to them . If we only gave students real words to read and spell , we wouldn't know whether they were able to apply their knowledge to new situations or they had just memorised the words .

Let's run through the uses of nonsense words and some of the assessments where you'll see them used . In the early years, nonsense words should be a part of regular phonics monitoring and be present in the monitoring , assessment or screener that comes with every phonics program .

Teachers using our Reading Success in Action have access to such a tool that can be used on all children who are learning the alphabetic principle , regardless of age . It's one of the first things I do with students I'm tutoring , no matter what grade they are in .

I have a look , I figure out whether they can recognize graphemes , read real words and read nonsense words . Resource Room members can find this monitoring tool in the planning and assessment section of the membership . The inclusion of nonsense words allows you to assess three levels of knowledge . The first is the ability to automatically recognise the grapheme .

The second level of knowledge is real words or , as in , can you read a real word ? And the third level is can you read a nonsense word ? Being able to read the nonsense words is a great indicator that the student is really starting to make progress in decoding .

Accurately sounding out an unfamiliar word is one of the necessary skills that students need to begin to read decodable text and then to read more widely . It's needed because we can't teach every single word to the students, they have to be able to manage words they haven't seen before .

And just an aside, when you assess students who have been learning to read for a while , you might notice that they are more accurate with the nonsense word than the real words , and my observation has been that this is due to them rushing through the real words but then they're forced to take their time with the nonsense words .

It's nothing to be alarmed about , it's just something to notice . There are other assessments that include nonsense words as a key component . Both Dibbles and Acadience, two freely available normed reading screeners, include a non-word component of the test .

The Castles and Colhart Test 2 , also known as the CC2 , is a word reading test that contains a mix of real words and non-words, it's a single word test . This test is part of the motif suite of assessments that is freely available online and has been normed on over a thousand children .

I'm sharing details of assessments found online , but unless you're trying to determine whether a student might be experiencing difficulty , you don't necessarily need to use a normed tool such as the CC2 . You can simply use the monitoring assessment from your phonics program .

This does two jobs: it helps you literally monitor student progress in decoding and it informs your specific next steps in teaching . Using an assessment tool that sits outside your program has really important uses , but it doesn't necessarily help you pinpoint what to teach next .

So be clear about the purpose of the assessment and make sure that you're not doubling up unnecessarily . The other area where non-words appear is , in particular spelling tests . Just as with reading assessment , nonsense words in spelling assessment help us know whether students can apply their knowledge to unknown words or unfamiliar words .

This is important because students may have accurate spelling in their writing but not really have strong conscious knowledge of how words work . One of the questions I ask when I'm modelling in classrooms is: hands up if you write words , realise that they don't look right , and then you pop an E on the end to try and fix it .

And I'm not kidding here, fully three quarters of the class puts their hands up every time . The other question I ask them is about how many of them have interesting things to say in their writing but they don't use great words 'cause they don't know how to spell them .

And again , most hands go up , usually with a few embarrassed looks around to see who else is putting their hand up , but these things are common in our classrooms . Using student writing as a method of identifying what knowledge and skills students have can be misleading .

Many students simply aren't using words that contain more complex or less common patterns because they're unsure of them . However , when you complete a non-word spelling test , you know exactly what students do and don't know . The nice thing about a nonsense word spelling test is that it also gives you brilliant information about students reading .

It's a safe bet to assume that if a student can accurately spell nonsense words with a range of letter combinations and patterns , they can read them . When I work with a school , I often have them complete a non-word spelling test focus on phonics that includes questions such as: write down all the ways you know how to spell the phoneme "a .

While you aren't looking for them to know every single phoneme- grapheme correspondence in existence , we do want to see that they have a reasonable grasp on the alphabetic code . If you don't have a specific non-word spelling test , I recommend using your school's phonics monitoring tool and then apply it as a spelling test in year three to six .

It's much more efficient and it gives you a lot of information . If you do this, make sure that you include the nonsense words and those questions about: write down all the ways that you know how to spell , whatever the phoneme is . That will really round out the information for you .

You can find a nonsense word spelling test on the Motif site called DIST-N the Diagnostic Spelling Test Non-Words . This examines 40 sound letter rules over about 70 words . It contains norms from testing on over 600 students , so not thousands of students , but the norms are still there for you to refer to .

Again, if you're trying to determine whether a student is experiencing difficulty , give them this test . If you want to know what they do and don't know , in order to fill gaps, you've probably already got something in school that will serve your purpose . The final area that we use nonsense words in is morphology assessment .

Last year I created a morphology diagnostic to test whether students were able to use the most common suffixes and suffixing conventions , such as doubling , dropping the e and changing the y to an i . These conventions help students enormously in their spelling . Our assessment contains 28 words that are all nonsense .

They make sure that the fact that the base word is a nonsense word isn't the reason that students might struggle to correctly spell the word . We ensure this by providing a student response sheet that contains the nonsense base word .

I wanted to make sure when I created this assessment , that we were really testing students' knowledge of using suffixing conventions , not making them confused by the use of the non-word itself . I have had many schools administer this assessment and every one of them has been surprised by the results .

Year three to six teachers develop impressions of students' skill and knowledge in spelling from real word writing , both at word and text level . These impressions are often not very accurate .

Consistently , the students perceived to be the strongest spellers don't perform as well as the teachers thought they would , and it's a real surprise when they see that they actually don't have a solid grasp on many of these concepts . My view of this is that these students are often running on instinct in their spelling .

They know what looks right and , yes , that's important , but it's also critical to know why words are spelled the way they are . Equally , students who have had strong intervention in systematic synthetic phonics that has had a morphology component perform better than expected .

So these students are generally considered weaker in literacy across the board , across all areas , but they tend to perform against expectations when it comes to this assessment . Nonsense words in this context give a much clearer picture of student understanding of how words work than a standard real word test .

I've included the link to download our morphology diagnostic assessment for year three and beyond in the show notes for this episode on our website . So, why not try it out and see what happens ? Then , once you've discovered where your students are up to , you can get started filling those gaps .

You'll either have something already available to you or Resource Room members already have access to all they need in this regard through our early morphology lessons . They're also called the pink lessons . In this diagnostic you'll also find a table outlining where you can find particular lessons to address your student gaps in our Spelling Success in Action 1 book .

That one's available on our website , but you'll be able to tell from the assessment where the gaps are and then you can start to fill them . Another area that we use nonsense words in morphology assessment is in our Spelling Success in Action 2 program that focuses on prefixes and suffixes .

At the end of each unit there is an assessment that covers both meaning and spelling . The spelling component contains two nonsense words with differing levels of orthographic complexity . The base of these words is real , so the whole thing is not nonsense , but the combination of the real base and prefixes and suffixes is not actually real .

This helps you identify whether students are using the prefix or suffix in the context of real words only or whether they can apply it to unknown circumstances , and that's one of the levels of development that you're looking for . I'd like to end this episode by addressing the concerns about nonsense words from the start of the episode .

If we use nonsense words , will they start to appear in writing ? And won't the nonsense words take over the real words in children's memory ? Now , neither of these things will happen , because we aren't teaching these words , we're not repeating them . We're using them as a one-off way to assess .

The next concern was does it really make sense to use words that don't mean anything, surely that's a waste of time ? The nonsense words have a purpose , which is to test whether students actually have the knowledge and skill we think they do , or whether they're just relying on memory .

The other thing about making sense of nonsense words is if you've ever read a Dr Seuss book , it's full of nonsense words . The point has been made over and over in various places that Harry Potter is full of nonsense words .

Children are going to encounter words that are made up , and let's remember that a large proportion well , not a large proportion , but Shakespeare himself was responsible for the creation of a very large number of words that he just made up . So not everything in language is static, we're going to come across words that we're not familiar with .

We need to know how to tackle them . The last concern on that list was: don't the nonsense words just make it harder for our students who have poor memories and vocabularies to learn and perform on assessment ? Now , on this point , I have to acknowledge some truth here , sort of .

Yes , nonsense words may be harder for students with phonological processing difficulties . They may also be harder for students with English as an additional language to work with , because these kids spend so much of their time trying to make the thing they sound out be real . This doesn't mean that we shouldn't use them . Their value has been shown over

time and shouldn't be underestimated . If students find the nonsense words tricky , we shouldn't reduce our expectations of performance, we should adjust our teaching to ensure that our students develop the skill and knowledge they need to be strong readers and spellers . This is one of those areas of assessment that I think we need to keep in mind .

Students not performing well on the assessment doesn't mean we lower the expectation or we make the assessment easier . It means we have to think about how we adjust instruction to support these students even better . If your team is expressing doubt about the inclusion of nonsense words in assessment , please reassure them that we aren't harming students .

The nonsense words enable us to go deeper with our exploration of student understanding and skill . I wish you all the best for your week ahead . Bye for now .