Speak and spell

M is worried about her daughter's spelling.

She tells us that last year she was doing very well in tests but with a change of teacher, her results have dropped off. She spoke to the teacher and he didn't seem concerned. We're focusing on expression this year, he has told her.

M's daughter is switching schools for next year for unrelated reasons. I'm going to ask them, she says, what they think about spelling.

What does it matter? I say to her. The child's only 8. In any case, I say, what counts in literacy is how good you are at saying what you want to say, not whether you can spell it.

M is, of course, a rightist. She's not politically aware enough to know that that is what she is (the distinction between right and left is lost on most people, and they are none the worse for that.

But surely spelling is not a political issue, I can hear you saying. Surely right and left agree that it is a good thing that children should be able to spell? Well yes, but it's a question of emphasis.

The right sees in a fall in scores for spelling the ruination of the education system. In the same way, M sees her daughter's no longer being able to reliably spell near as a symbol of the school's going downhill. She does not ask herself whether there are any other factors in her daughter's seeming lack of progress (whether perhaps children are better able to spell when their English-learning effort consists solely of learning how to spell a few dozen words than they are when they are called on to make sentences out of the words they know how to write; whether an 8-year-old has a different set of abilities in memory than a 7-year-old; whether her child is otherwise tired or stressed -- perhaps because she is a talented gymnast who trains for 25 hours a week or because her parents have marital problems). Rightists do not, it seems to me, look beyond the obvious answer when they consider these or any other issues.

***

As it happens, a lot of effort is put into learning to spell to very little reward. It seems to me that I can spell because I read. In most of my classes that focused on spelling, I knew the answers before I was posed the questions because I was an avid reader. It is impossible to learn English spelling entirely by rule because there is no straight correspondence between sound and spelling. (This might seem obvious to the literate but it is the entire problem. Learning to spell Polish or Italian is easy and a child need only learn the rules of correspondence. And note that the problem with English spelling is often misstated. People complain that letters do not represent the same sound (the famous ghoti example springs to mind, but that is not a problem -- one would simply learn the 1 to M correspondences and have a slightly longer but no more complex task in learning to spell -- rather it is that when you hear the sound "i:", you cannot know how to spell it by rule. Should you write "ea", "ee", "i", "y"? It depends entirely on the word.) When M's child hears "near", it is saying to her "spell me 'neer'". (As an aside, perhaps in the previous year, when she spelled "near" correctly, she had not encountered "deer"; and, having now met that word, has generalised its spelling. This is what children are hardwired to do with language, as those with toddlers who make endearing errors with the past tense know -- I particularly like "ated". We learn, in time, and with greater exposure to the language, what cannot be generalised. In any case, "ea" vs "ee" is a minefield, complicated further by "eCe". There are confusing homophones that frustratingly do not make complete sets(dear, deer; sear, seer, sere; meat, meet, mete; beat, beet).)

What is the solution? Have the child read. When she sees enough times that "near" is so spelled, she will not err. Chinese schoolchildren learn by associating shapes with words, and in fact, when you teach literacy, you begin by teaching the student to do the same with English words. Readers do not as it happens spell out words. They recognise them in batches. Nor in writing is it likely we spell out what we want to say. We call up the word entire. (Of course, in typing it, our fingers must be instructed how to proceed, but does that mean that we spell it out as we think it? I don't think so.) I doubt many people who read a lot have many problems with spelling. (Even editors such as Dr Zen occasionally write "their" for "there" and forget how many a's are in "separate" -- my bogey word for many years because I could not dissociate it from "desperate"!)

M's child might well come to hate learning if for her it is a process aimed at scoring in tests rather than a means to open windows on the world that surrounds her. That would be a pity but, as is so often the case, a rigid insistence on "values" that drift without foundation in any broader view of the world or how it works and can work will likely lead to a bad end.

posted by Dr Zen @ 12:11 pm