Spelling question?

Question

goat, boat, coat, neat, read, laid, etc.

what determines the spelling of these long vowels sound words.

How do you know when to use the two vowels rather that the silent e at the end. Thank you for you help.

Answer 1

I do not understand your question as there is no silent e at the end of any of the words. If there was a consonant after the first vowel then you would pronounce the second vowel. For example aced (long vowel sound) acTed (two short vowel sounds). Hope this helps you.

Answer 2

I don't know that there is a specific rule that determines when to use which combination... you just get to know what looks right and what looks wrong after awhile.  I do know that the long e sound is very rarely spelled with a silent e on the end, instead either ea or ee is used, but even that "rule" is broken on occasion:  "concrete" ,  "Pete".

Answer 3

I am not sure if I'll be much help but the way I taught my little ones when learning to read such words was "Two vowels together the first one does the talking, the second one does the walking (meaning is silent), so basically the first vowel says it's name and the second follows quietly.

In teaching this it's helped my little ones on spelling as well, yet they also know there are exceptions and some words are what we call "funny" words because they don't follow the rules.  You'll find most words follow the the two vowel rule though.

Answer 4

It's determined by history. The varied spelling in English comes from it being basically a Germanic language (Old English) with a mass of French and Latin words dumped on top. That also gives the weird plurals and verbs.

Answer 5

Jo has good input, and that's what I was going to say.  It's from Leap Frog products :-)

There is no silent e on these words.  You don't use it in your list, because there are two vowels.  A long vowel_silent e word has the long vowel by itself.

As others have said, these are really "heart words" - words you just have to know by heart that they are spelled that way and not:  gote, bote, cote, nete, rede, lade.  There are *many* words in English that don't follow any rules.  It's because English is a mix of Latin, Greek, and German (and others).

Answer 6

It's a matter of having enough exposure to them that you remember them. You'd have to go into the history of the words to find out why they are spelled the way they are, and that's usually not practical, at least not for remembering spelling. You practise, practise, practise rather than remembering rules about when to use oa rather than o_e.

It's more the reverse: the spelling determines the pronunciation, not the pronunciation (long vowel sound) determines spelling.

Btw, laid is one that DOES have a rule: it's the past tense of lay, so you replace the y with an i before adding the d.