The Spelling in "Irregular" Past Tense Verbs

A while after taking classes in Structured Word Inquiry and orthographic linguistics, I started to explore English orthography with my students and clients, beyond just prefixes and suffixes. I was already comfortable with teaching that <played> has the base <play> with the suffix <-ed>; I wanted to explore English spelling on a deeper level.

You see that I typed the above words in angle brackets (< >). These brackets to refer an element, which is a written morpheme. I’ll also write more on that later – in short, the morphemes addressed in this entry include base elements (what many call “base words”, like <play>) and suffixes (like <-ed>; the hyphen indicates that the suffix comes after the base).

I started to incorporate SWI with more common speech-language therapy goals. For example, students may have a therapy goal of improving their understanding and use of past tense verbs, including “irregular” past tense verbs. The client that I had in one of my first SWI sessions had this sort of goal.

We had been working on prefixes and suffixes for a bit, so he already had an introduction to identifying, or noticing, the morphemes in the words we talked about.

After watching Real Spelling’s video on the word <said>, I decided to switch it up a bit. I wanted to target these “irregular” past tense verbs.

As you’ll see from the video, Old English <-d> was a suffix for producing a past tense derivation of a verb.

We first made sentences with the present tense verbs <hear>, <do> and <say>, and wrote those verbs.

We then made sentences with the past tense forms, and wrote those verbs.

Hear - heard

Do – did

Say – Said

Have - Had

Lay - Laid

Pay - Paid

After seeing these words written out next to each other, he asked, “Does the <-d> mean past tense?”

I was shocked – My client, with a diagnosed language impairment, made that connection independently, and quickly.

This is Structured Word Inquiry. My client made an observation and asked a question about what he saw. This was the process I had been waiting to experience with my clients. I was so excited!

So, we then made some sentences with verbs such as <keep>, <sweep>, <sleep>, <weep>.

I wrote down these words along with their past tense/ past participle forms, so our list looked something like this:

keep - kept

sleep - slept

sweep - swept

weep - wept

feel - felt

We saw the pattern, and wondered if that <t> was possibly a suffix that indicated the past tense.

After searching online, we found that <d> and <t> were used to form the past tense of verbs in a category called weak verbs.

Some other examples include:

lose - lost

leave - left

mean - meant

Strong verbs, on the other hand, are verbs that change the stem vowel in order to reflect the past tense or past participle.

Some examples include:

grow - grew - grown

blow - blew - blown

know - knew - known

ring - rang - rung

sing - sang - sung

...What happened next in the session? Stay tuned for the next episode, in which I talk a little bit about the Homophone Principle, and explore why <heard> and <herd> are spelled differently.

Thanks to Shawna Pope-Jefferson and Gail Venable for their input and assistance in writing this entry.