English Isn’t Random: Teaching the Patterns Hidden in Plain Sight

Don’t ever tell a child “English is just random”! It’s complex, but it does have some reliable patterns that can be learnt. Despite the importance of explicit instruction, children learn more via their own implicit statistical learning than you can ever hope to teach them. For the kids who are not strong statistical learners, what we do as educators is help ‘kickstart’ that implicit statistical learning by explicitly showing them patterns that exist in the written (and oral) language. Helped, helping, unhelpful, helpless, helpfully – every part of all of those words is re-used in other words. Even just being shown that these “islands of regularity” exist, can be confidence building for a struggling child.