Word Story Text

and HERE is HERE Learning how the spelling HERE is pronounced should be easy.
It ends in a silent E which makes the vowel the long E, “hear”

HERE is also a high frequency word, which means that it is used a lot in texts and in speech. Beginning readers have to learn such words because they are used so often. But that also means that books provide many opportunities to practice high frequency words and solidify knowledge of their spellings, sounds, and meanings.

Still, two things complicate learning HERE:

surprisingly, it doesn’t have many friends–other words that end in -ERE. Its friends are lower frequency words like SPHERE MERE and ADHERE that young readers don’t have to learn yet. In learning HERE they don’t get much help from other -ERE words.

Even worse, HERE has a lot of false friends: words that are spelled similarly but pronounced differently. and they too are high in frequency.

ERE is pronounced differently in THERE and WHERE.

and then there’s WERE

so, the challenge isn’t just learning to pronounce HERE, it’s not getting confused by the false friends that are being learned around the same time. Cognitive psychologists say that these words can interfere with each other.

Notice also that this is a case where the “self-teaching mechanism” described by researcher David Share can fail.

His idea is that children learn a lot of phonics by pronouncing a word aloud and then deciding if it “sounds right”--does the pronunciation match a word they know from spoken language. This is useful in many cases, but it can go wrong sometimes.

say the child is reading the word HERE h-e-r-e and says “hair”, as in THERE and WHERE.

“Hair” is also a word they know from spoken language. They would therefore mistakenly conclude that they had pronounced the word correctly, and that h-e-r-e is the spelling of “hair”. That would a big mistake.

How can beginning readers learn these words then?

The trick is to keep HERE away from the false friends THERE and WHERE. that can be done by creating a small neighborhood around there and where.

Where’s Waldo? somewhere, anywhere, nowhere–THERE.

you might also use a mnemonic phrase like “here there and everywhere”, which is the title of a pretty Beatles song. Be sure to couple the spellings of the words with their sounds.

Finally you can pair HERE “here” with its homophone HEAR “here”. Learning to spell these words can also help learners remember how they are pronounced.

see the entries for THERE, WHERE, and WERE for more.

Homophones

hear

Antonyms

there

Quotes

“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.” Muhammad Ali

“There are no strangers here Only friends you haven’t yet met.” William Butler Yeats

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Ronald Reagan

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” William Shakespeare