Why we should continue to teach the “‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’” spelling rule

The British government has said this spelling rule is no longer worth teaching because there are so many exceptions to the rule. I think this is a mistake – a mistake to get rid of it and a mistake or misunderstanding of where the rule is supposed to be applied.

I was taught this rule is applied only specifically words with two (or more) syllables which have the long ‘ee’ sound such as ‘believe’, ‘reprieve’, ‘receive’ and ‘retrieve’.

According to the BNC nearly 2% of all words contain either the ‘ei’ or ‘ie’ combination their spelling. This means you will roughly come across this once in every 50 words in writing. Of these roughly two-thirds are ‘ie’ and the remaining one-third ‘ei’. A further one-fifteenth of ‘ei’ (0.04% of the entire English usage) is specifically ‘~cei~’.

This may seem like a small portion but experience will tell you that you come across this enough times to have to think about it when writing.

Let’s put it this way, this rule is catchy enough to stay with most people. It is a just matter of knowing when to apply it – that is, when coming across a long ‘e’ vowel sound usually after the second syllable.

The following are a list of words to which this spelling rule applies to: ACHIEVED ACHIEVER ACHIEVES AGGRIEVE BELIEVED BELIEVER BELIEVES GRIEVERS GRIEVING GRIEVOUS RELIEVED RELIEVER RELIEVES REPRIEVE RETRIEVE THIEVERY THIEVING THIEVISH ACHIEVE BELIEVE GRIEVED GRIEVER GRIEVES RELIEVE SIEVING THIEVED THIEVES GRIEVE SIEVED SIEVES THIEVE SIEVE and CEILINGS CONCEITS CONCEIVE DECEIVED DECEIVER DECEIVES PERCEIVE RECEIPTS RECEIVED RECEIVER RECEIVES CEILING CONCEIT DECEITS DECEIVE RECEIPT RECEIVE DECEIT.

In the real world one would come across one of these words in writing about once in a thousand words (or about four pages of writing). That is plenty to warrant the learner to remember this word … unless looking up a dictionary frequently is something they enjoy doing.

And remember: all the rest of the time the spelling can be worked out from the pronunciation.

Developing Linguistic Corpora

Here is a nice guide for corpus linguistics entitled Developing Linguistic Corpora at:
http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/guides/linguistic-corpora/index.htm

Contributors to this online text are John Sinclair, Geoffrey Leech, Lou Burnard, Paul Thompson and Martin Wynne (editor).

This text is not written for the English teacher in mind and some technical points may be difficult to grasp.

Online concordancing

If you require just a simple concordancer then go to Concordancer at http://ec.hku.hk/vocabulary/concordancer.htm. It give only counts and highlights of the search term with no KWIC.

Praat

Praat is “a free scientific computer software program for the analysis of speech in phonetics”.

ConcApp 5

The concordancer software ConcApp (version 5) has now become purchaseware. It is an easy to use program recommended for those learning to use corpus and concordancers. Its best feature, though, is that it can be used for not only English and French texts but also Japanese (tested), Chinese, Thai and Russian.

While it is purchaseware it is reasonably priced (USD20 as of posting), well worth it if you are in need of concordancing in languages other than English.

The WordSmith Tools mailing list

If you use WordSmith Tools and you haven’t already become a member of Mike Scott’s WordSmith Tools mailing list then you should. Questions and queries about the program and its use can be made at this open forum. More information can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/WordSmithTools/.

Japanese primary schools to teach 285 English words in 2011

From the Yomiuri Shimbun (copied and pasted due to lack of archive)

Fifth- and sixth-year primary school students will learn a total of 285 English words and 50 expressions in compulsory English classes to be introduced in the 2011 school year, the Education, Science and Technology Ministry said Thursday.

The students are expected to learn the words and expressions with textbooks compiled by the ministry titled “Eigo Noto,” (English Notes), according to ministry officials. The 50 expressions are currently taught in the first year of middle school. The ministry has distributed a preliminary version of the textbooks–one each for fifth-graders and sixth-graders–to about 550 schools nationwide to be used on a trial basis in the school year that started this month.

WordNet 3.0 Vocabulary Helper

This seems like an interesting tool, WordNet 3.0 Vocabulary Helper. Wikipedia defines WordNet as something which “groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets.”

Created at Princeton University for research in Machine Translation. An offline version can be downloaded from the official Princeton University website.

Just The Word

I found this online concordancer called JustTheWord. It looks like it was made for teachers to search for (Japanese) student errors.

Errors in JACET 8000 Level Marker

I have been using the JACET8000 Level Marker page for my research. It is a great tool. And I would like to thank the creator, Shinichi Shimizu, for it. However, when I checked the output I had found a number of errors. Below is a list of words which have been incorrectly numbered. The digit to the left (in red) of the word is what the output gives. The digit to the right (in green) is what the number or level should be:

1	march	2
1	lower	3
1	saw	3
1	means	4
1	thanks	4
1	leading	4
1	finding	4
1	thinking	4
1	china	4
1	sin	4
1	colored	4
1	saying	5
1	forward	5
1	basin	5
1	doing	5
1	making	5
1	controlled	5
1	kin	6
1	mar	8
2	audience	1
2	preferred	6
2	flatter	7
3	interpret	2
3	clothes	4
3	handicapped	6
4	including	3
4	upward	7
5	boom	4
5	ethics	6
5	summons	6
6	constructive	5
6	ragged	7
6	robin	7
7	chatter	6
8	coastline	7
9	alight	8

I had checked this with the March 2003 data as well as the publication “Daigaku Eigo Kyoiku Gakkai Kihongo ni Motozuku JACET 8000 Eitango” (ISBN 9784342788734). This information was correct at the time of posting.

[update] Checking through some of the words I found they were difficult to classify. For example, ’saw’ could be the past tense of the verb ’see’. In that case it would be placed in JACET 1. But as a noun – an tool to cut things in half – it would be in JACET 3. But others were clearly errors. ‘Audience’, ‘interpret’, ‘including’, ‘boom’, ‘constructive’, ‘chatter’ and ‘alight’ were numbering errors at the cut-off point between levels. The rest of the errors I cannot figure out.