balk (US, spelt baulk in UK English)
chalk
stalk
talk
walk
4 responses to “al as in walk”
Leave a Reply
The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
Spelfabet
Learning the building blocks of words - sounds, their spellings, and word parts
Your lists are so helpful Alison, thank you! I have another one for this list…balk.
Hi Caroline, Thanks for the nice feedback, much appreciated. I write “baulk” not “balk” so I looked it up and the latter is the correct American English spelling, you’re right. I’ll add it now, with the British English spelling in brackets. All the best, Alison
Hi Alison,
Not sure if you still get notified when someone leaves a comment but I’ll leave one anyway.
I’ve been researching the words ‘walk’, ‘talk’ etc to find the best way to explain this spelling when teaching these words.
If you look at the etymology of each word that has this spelling, the letter [l] can be link to the words origins. Talk originates from the word ‘talken’ and has links with the word ‘tale’ and ‘tell’. Walk originates from the Old English ‘wealcan’ and Proto-Germanic ‘welk’ both of which possibly come from the PIE root ‘wel’.
Stalk is linked to the word ‘steal’ and chalk comes from the Latin word ‘calx’ meaning limestone and so has links to words such as calcium and calcify.
So the letters [a] and [l] are not forming a digraph in these words. Rather the [a] is representing the /or/ phoneme and the [l] is serving as an etymological marker to provide a signal between the words that are connected. Eg. The [l] remains in the word ‘talk’ as an etymological marker to show the connection between talk, tell and tale.
The word talk is actually mentioned in “Beneath the Surface of Words” on page 103.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Kate Marschall
Hi Kate, lovely to hear from an ACTUAL PERSON in the comments, and a NICE ONE THAT I KNOW, not just spam all the time! I would love to have time to go back through all my lists and add information like this great etymological stuff in some kind of lovely clickable network way that shows the layers in words, but alas, I lack the skills and time. However, when phoneme-grapheme relationships are unusual it’s good to give kids a bit more information about them, I agree. I’ve read ‘Beneath the Surface of Words’ and lots of other things about etymology, but from an intervention point of view I usually just tell kids that when words have funny spellings it is usually because the word is spelt the way it was said in the olden days, when its spelling was invented. I say that it’s a good idea to say such words in the olden days way while writing them (in their ‘spelling voices’), to give themselves a verbal mnemonic for the spelling. Some kids really get into the etymology, especially words from the Vikings, in which case I go into more detail and put them/their parents onto the etymology online website and they can find out about word origins for themselves. But this list is just a GPC or PGC list in current General Australian pronunciation, I’m not trying to give the whole explanation for every spelling. Some spellings are better explained from a phoneme-grapheme point of view, some from a morphological point of view, and some using etymology. Teachers/therapists who know about these layers can focus on the most useful one when targeting a particular pattern. It’s great that so many people are now interested in this and there’s so much information available about it. Hope you and yours are fit and fine, all the best, Alison