Making Literacy REAL for everyone!

Words! Literacy Club

Analysis Projects

Schools are still insisting to children that there is a suffix <*tion>. A number of students I worked with in 2006 decided to investigate this assertion and determine once and for all whether such a suffix could indeed exist.  Over time six students became involved in the analysis and the results of their research collated providing uncontroversial evidence that there is no suffix <*tion> (and by association, nor is there a suffix <*sion>). Click on the picture to find out why.

Why <*tion> can never be a suffix

· Analysing an Old English trigraph <ugh>

· Why <*tion> can never be a suffix

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Periodically some of the students working at Words! decide to conduct a detailed analysis to validate an hypothesis, disprove an old assumption or to help clarify their understanding. To date two in depth analysis projects have been conducted, both group efforts.

They are and will continue to be works in progress but they have raised some brilliant questions and provided us with hours of intriguing research.

Farheen and her friend Anushka started this analysis as part of their work with real phonology. They wanted to find all the different ways that this trigraph is pronounced in English and the circumstances that governed that pronunciation. During their analysis they discovered an anomaly that they couldn’t explain—neither could I!

Analysing an Old English trigraph <ugh>

Click to go the podcast.

Click to download the analysis.

They decided to write to Melvyn Ramsden for his views on the matter and he responded with a series of podcasts. It seems the girls’ question had challenged some previously held beliefs.