This week, brainy American youngsters have been competing in their National Spelling Bee, so what better time to ask Johanna Stirling, author of The Spelling Blog, to share three myths about English spelling from her recent British Council seminar.
Are you an English language teacher? Put your hand up if all your students are good spellers in English.
Hmm… I don’t see many hands! That’s why I started finding out how to help my struggling learners.
Researching spelling and how it’s taught, especially to English language learners, has made me question several common assumptions. So here we’ll explore, or explode, three of these myths.
You can watch the video of my British Council seminar to see another four go up in a puff of smoke, and see more ways to transform your struggling spellers into more confident ones.
1. Myth: English spelling is chaotic
Some students think that learning English spelling is an impossible task because they’ve been told that there is no system to English spelling – you just have to learn each word. What a Herculean task!
It’s not chaotic though, just complex. The problem isn’t that there’s no system, but that there are too many systems.
At the heart of English spelling, there is a phonological system – alphabetic letters related to sounds. We spell 'big' b-i-g because of simple sound-to-letter correspondence. But only about 50 per cent of words seem to be phonetically spelled. And unfortunately, the most common words are less likely to be spelled this way.
There is also an etymological system, which in fact seems to take precedence over the phonological. We spell 'myth' with a 'y' and not an 'i' because the 'y' comes from Greek, and we have kept that, rather than converting the spelling to fit our phonological system. Similarly, words ending in 'ough', like 'although', 'tough' and 'borough', have kept their Anglo-Saxon spelling, although their pronunciation changed long ago.
Thankfully, the third system, morphological, has a high degree of regularity. We add prefixes to whole words, hence the double 's' in misspelled and single one in misheard. We also have a learnable system for adding suffixes to words: in 'excitement' we add -ment to the whole word because this suffix begins with a consonant, but in 'excitable' we drop the final 'e' of 'excite' before a suffix starting with a vowel (-able).
Finally, there’s a graphemic system which dictates several common spelling patterns, many of which are not related to sound at all. For example, native English words don’t end with the letter 'v', which is why 'give' ends with 'e' although the preceding vowel is short.
If teachers raise their learners’ awareness of these systems and refer to them when teaching, English spelling stops being an uncontrollable monster. The video of my seminar shows some ways to do this.
2. Myth: Testing is teaching
The words 'spelling' and 'test' often go together – but should they? If you’re a good speller, these tests are harmless, but for everyone else, they can be a rather pointless nightmare.
Teachers often give a list of words on Monday to be learnt for a test on Friday. The weak spellers sweat over these night after night, rather than reading books – you know those things full of meaningful spelling? Then, when Friday comes, some still fail, which just goes to prove to them what they knew all along – they’re rubbish at spelling, so why bother trying?
Others have worked so hard that they succeed and get a good score in the test. But have they really learnt the spellings? What would happen if they had a surprise test on the same words on the following Monday, or are asked to write the words in sentences? These ‘Friday spellers’ very often prove here that they don’t really know the spellings they’ve ‘learned’ for a test.
So how can we assess our students’ spelling? It’s simple – get them to write. Not just words, but sentences, paragraphs, texts. You’ll soon see who needs help with spelling and who doesn’t.
3. Myth: Technology is ruining spelling
We hear this all the time, but I would make the following arguments:
- People have always found English spelling difficult, not only since texting and Facebook arrived.
- Technology can be a really strict taskmaster demanding 100 per cent accuracy in games, email addresses, URLs, etc.
- It provides more opportunities for writing than we’ve probably ever had in history, as well as audiences for our students’ writing, such as the fabulous Greetings from the world, a project that encourages learners to create digital posters to teach others about their countries.
- There are also some great programmes for learning spelling like the British Council’s LearnEnglish Kids vocabulary games, LearnEnglish Teens Sushi Spell game, and Spelling City. Oh, and my own site, The Spelling Blog, has plenty more discussion of spelling issues, free downloadable activities, and my book, Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners.
Teachers, visit English Agenda to keep up to date with the latest news and events from the world of English language teaching.