Job Discussion Forums

[Justin Trullinger]

Without commenting on the trend towards natives who can't spell (Disgraceful really. Don�t these people ever read?? Oop, I guess that was a comment...) I do feel that students should be introduced gradually to our unique spelling.

Especially when working with small children (4-6, Spanish speakers) I accept practically any phonetic approximation of English.

"Mai neim is Juan" is clearly a bogus sentence, in writing, but if you take the Spanish alphabet into account, it shows a student who actually knows how the words sound. Gradually, we ease them into more correct English, but insisting on correct spelling from the beginning is just one of many ways to screw a childs pronuciation up. (At 5, if they know the letters, they rarely understand the distinction between the letters and the sounds...)

In beginning levels, I tend to use the "recognizability" test. If a word looks more like itself than like any other word, I lean towards accepting it.

Regards,
Justin

[Chasgul]

[Justin Trullinger]

[dyak]

It seems to me that students are under the impression that English spelling has some relation to sound. And while you can approximate English words from the sound, you'll never spell 100% correctly. I try to make them see words as i see them, as pictures. For example, if i see 'apreciate', it looks like a picture that's not quite right. The double p makes no difference to the sound, i know there should be two ps to make the picture correct. A lot of students really appreciate this way of seeing things as it's difficult to accept when nearly every other language is more or less phonetic.

[Jim Bigelow]

Hi all,

Just chucking this into the arena!
Sent to Daily Telegraph (UK), May 16, 2005

Re: Incorrect spelling will not be penalised in
English tests, May 15, 2005

People think that penalising spelling on exams is
important because it will encourage teachers and
students to try harder to improve. But "trying
harder" has not been shown to be very effective in
improving spelling.

Research on how we learn to spell suggests that most
of our spelling competence is subconsciously absorbed
from reading: Good readers usually become very good
(but not always perfect) spellers. Studies done over
the last century also show that direct instruction and
"learning the rules" in spelling has very limited
effects.

In other words, we learn to spell not by "trying hard"
in school and doing spelling exercises but through
massive reading.

If this research is correct, it suggests that
penalising incorrect spelling will not result in
improved spelling.

Stephen Krashen, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

[dmb]

What if what you are reading is spelled incorrectly. Then your spelling wouldn't improve.

[valley_girl]

I agree completely that reading is essential. Reading and writing go hand in hand.

[Alex42]

[Jim Bigelow]

Oh if I had a $ for every time I heard somebody say Krashen was talking bollocks!

[Stephen Jones]

Krashen is oversimplifying, as always.

Massive reading will give you a lot of exposure to the written form and in English that is often necessary because English spelling is geared more to the underlying representation of the word than its actual sound.

However, it is my experience that English Literature graduates, who read an immense amount, are often very poor spellers. I suspect that is because we learned to read without any difficulty, and so don't fixate on the actual letters used.

I was a poor speller until I had to teach English and start correcting student mistakes.

But the average learner may well profit much more from extensive reading than from having all his mistakes corrected.

[Glenski]

Taken from http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/eric/ed250695.html
Richard E. Hodges, another authority in the field

...spelling ability involves more than memorizing the spelling of individual words. Researchers' observations reveal that spelling ability is a developmental achievement gained through interaction over time with the orthography in both writing and reading. With experience, children learn much about the general structural properties of English words--about their sounds, graphemes, roots, affixes, and so on. Learning to spell, in short, involves learning about words over a long duration and in a variety of contexts.

[tesol1]

There are times & places where penalizing spelling is appropriate, as well as times & places when it is not.

Ask yourself when you are grading an exam, is spelling a component of what is being assessed on a given section of a test, or not?

On the listening portion of a test, for example, spelling has absolutely nothing to do with listening skills. Counting spelling here will only corrupt the evaluation of what is truly being guaged.

In language exercises, counting spelling is appropriate, because spelling is an important constituent of the form of a lexis item or language structure. It may, however, be appropriate to deduct a half or other portion of a mark if a word is spelled incorrectly, but the other aspects of the language are correct.

In writing exercises, as well, we should penalize for spelling, but only as a part of a much greater whole which includes both content and performance regarding language issues such as tense, punctuation, organization, etc.