Is it true that children around here are first taught to write words the way they are pronounced and then are taught all over again what the correct spellings are?
This sounds very strange.
Learning to Write
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
Is it true that children around here are first taught to write words the way they are pronounced and then are taught all over again what the correct spellings are?
This sounds very strange.
Clarissa's Blog 
We were told to “sound it out” if we weren’t sure how to spell it, which might work for another language but not for English. I’m addition to that advice, we had spelling as a subject from kindergarten until maybe 7th grade, where each week we were given a list of words to study, and at the end of the week there was a spelling test where the teacher said the words and we wrote them down. I think spelling tests are beginning to go out of style, which is good because they’re a waste of time. I learned how to spell by reading a lot, “spelling class” is pointless.
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Spelling tests are really important in English. They are NOT pointless.
I have never heard of such a thing, Clarissa. That is as outrageous as a fad that was in vogue a few decades back of teaching Whole Language reading. There was no phonetics, no sentence reading, etc. The smallest unit of language was a story.
One more reason why many people choose to homeschool, sadly.
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Maybe I just found them pointless because I already knew how to spell. Good point.
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When I went to school, I already knew how to wrote cursive both in Russian and in English. My parents had to fight hard to persuade the teachers not to make me unlearn cursive so that they could teach it to me all over again.
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And my first grade teachers demanded that my parents not let me read so much so I would not tire of it.
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“When I went to school, I already knew how to wrote cursive both in Russian and in English”
You’re a genius. Your experience is not necessarily going to prove useful to discussions of average children.
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“You’re a genius.”
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“vogue a few decades back of teaching Whole Language reading. There was no phonetics, no sentence reading, etc. The smallest unit of language was a story”
To be fair (though my antipathy toward WL is pretty strong) there is some theoretical justification for it.
Traditional models of learning to read start from the letter and work up to words and words are decoded one letter at a time.
Meanwhile fluent readers don’t do anything of the kind. They look at whole words and/or sentences.
The idea of WL was to teach children to do that form the beginning, for example saying the word cat a few times and then introducing the written form – cat, without breaking it down into letters and sounds. The idea was that children would work out their own rules.
There is some minority of children who thrive with WL approaches but on the whole, some version of phonics and letting the kids make the leap from individual letters to words and sentences on their own works better for most children.
I’d never heard of trying to teach children with stories first – that sounds beyond bizarre.
A caveat – WL is used as a cover term for a variety of approaches to teaching reading (mostly be people like me that don’t them).
I think the WL movement is part of the problem of colleges of education where people have to come up with new theories to stay relevant in spite of the fact that most things about basic education are mostly…. settled.
Children have a hard time learning to read and write English because English spelling is very hard. There’s no magic bullet fix for that.
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“The idea of WL was to teach children to do that form the beginning, for example saying the word cat a few times and then introducing the written form – cat, without breaking it down into letters and sounds. The idea was that children would work out their own rules.”
“Children have a hard time learning to read and write English because English spelling is very hard. There’s no magic bullet fix for that.”
“I think the WL movement is part of the problem of colleges of education where people have to come up with new theories to stay relevant in spite of the fact that most things about basic education are mostly…. settled.”
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“introducing the written form – cat, without breaking it down into letters and sounds
That is not a bad method at all. ”
There’s no real logical reason to not mention that c before a is usually pronounced k and that a before a final consonant in one syllable words has the ae sound.
“There is a single fix for that: they need to read a lot. Very few people fail to translate a rich readerly experience into good spelling.”
Well it’s hard to read a lot with no spelling skills, reading a lot can help spelling a lot but undeveloped skills are going to keep some from being able to read.
Again, a lot is up to the parents. IIRC there’s a lot of research that adults who don’t read much don’t necessarily like it if their children do.
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“IIRC there’s a lot of research that adults who don’t read much don’t necessarily like it if their children do.”
Yes, sad but true. I was that child, so I know all about it. 😦
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When I was a child there was a fad for teaching kids to read with wrong but simplified spellings (kw for qu, macrons to indicate long e; now that I think about it, were they teaching IPA or something like it?). Since I learned to read well before I started school, my parents had me skip first grade, which meant I didn’t need to learn two reading/writing systems. My spelling was atrocious until I was around ten, when suddenly I became very good at spelling. I have no idea whether that had to do with school or just with having reached a critical mass of reading.
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“When I was a child there was a fad”
Sounds like the Initial Teaching Alphabet (see my post below)
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That certainly wasn’t true when I was in grade school (admittedly a LONG time ago).
I was taught “phonics” in first-grade — I remember looking at the word “P-H-O-N-E” in spelling class, and thinking that that word couldn’t possibly be pronounced “FONE.” Incorrect spelling that matched the actual sound was never tolerated.
Nobody even pretended back then that Ebonics (or any other illiterate slang) was acceptable when teaching language.
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I can’t believe some bastard gave me a thumbs down for this.
Was mentioning “Ebonics” a micro-aggression? 🙂
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I’m offended you didn’t work a Common Core, Kumon or Suzuki joke in. Get with the times!
Also, phonemes have feelings, and numbers are onomotopoeia and stop making fun of synesthesia, please.
Of course back in Dreidel’s day, you learned how to write with your right hand or else. My algebra teacher always block printed because he said he had to teach himself how to write with his dominant hand because the nuns would beat him otherwise.
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Believe it or not, Dreidel has written left-handed all his life.
Kindergarten wasn’t required back in my day, but my Protestant parents were misguided enough to send me to a Catholic kindergarten (it was the only one within walking distance of my house), where the ex-Nazi nuns who had somehow escaped justice in Europe liked to beat on children — but the nuns did teach me the alphabet a full year before my first grade-grade classmates learned it in public school, and they actually let me use my left hand.
My public-school teachers and my parents did try to get me to stop writing with my hand held “upside down,” but I still write the same way Obama does, and after all the years, I have unusually legible handwriting for a doctor.
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“Was mentioning “Ebonics” a micro-aggression?”
No, just ignorance of the language sciences. African-American Vernacular English (I prefer the term Black English though AAVE seems to be the current term) is not “illiterate slang”. It is a dialect that differs from the American standard in a lot of important ways. If someone came up with a consisten way to write it, it would probably qualify as a separate language.
A European way of understand the Black American community is more than a little like an ethnic minority (like Galicians in Spain or Bretons in France or Albanians in southern Italy). The close correspondance between race and culture in this case (though not all Blacks in the US are African-American and not all African-Americans are technically Black) confuses the issue. But essentially it’s a group with its own cultural and linguistic norms that spends a lot of time interacting with the dominant cultural group (without adopting all its norms).
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Bullsticks. What you dignify as “African-American Vernacular English” is the illiterate bastard offspring of genuine, correctly spoken, educated English. It’s a $2 imitation of the real thing, like a $5 fake Rolex watch that the ignorant try to pass off as real.
It’s no different than the heavy Southern dialect that I learned as a boy in 1950s Tennessee. Dialects aren’t legitimate languages, because they aren’t truly distinct from the main family whose structure, words, and even mangled grammar they’ve appropriated — at most they’re totally dependent inbred mutant cousins.
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I take it you’ve never come across the saying “A language is a dialect with an army behind it.”
In reality it can be very difficult to tell the difference between a dialect and a language. Not come across the idea of a dialect continuum?
And whose correct English are you talking about? If you’re in America then your idea of correct English would not be the same as that used in England.
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Yes, you’re showing your ignorance here, Dreidel. I encourage you to pick up any recent History of the English Language book — or there have also been some good documentaries produced in the last decade or so.
There are many dialects of English. What you call Standard English (which I assume is some version of either East Coast American English or Broadcast American English) is only one dialect of English.
It’s the one taught in American schools and universities as “correct” or “standard” English, and for good reason — we all have to agree on what is (prescriptively) standard. But it is far from the only English dialect, and it is not even the only standard English dialect — there’s a British standard, and an Australian standard as well, just to name a few.
And yes, every English dialect is just as much a real dialect and a legitimate form of the language as any other. They all have grammars, vocabularies, and pronunciations. That’s the definition of a dialect of a language. Standard English (any kind, British, American, or Australian) is just one dialect among many.
As for AAVE (or Eubonics, as you called it — that’s an out-of-date term), that is indeed a dialect of English. To be precise, there are a number of dialects of AAVE, and they are all as legitimate as Standard English.
And there are legitimate reasons for having teachers understand the grammar and vocabulary of AAVE, especially if they plan to teach in an area where many of their students speak one of the dialects — just as, for instance, if a teacher planned to teach in an area where many of her students spoke German as their first language, we might want that teacher to know a little German. This is not so that young students don’t learn Standard English; it is so that teachers can help them with the transition.
With AAVE, of course, it is to keep young teachers from making precisely the mistake so often make — seeing their young AAVE speakers as “lazy” and “illiterate,” as speaking no language at all, as being “stupid” for speaking the dialect they learn at home.
I am speaking, by the way, as a Full Professor of English, who has taught the History of English for the past fifteen years.
Sorry for the long comment. This is, obviously, something I feel strongly about.
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We have already discussed this on the blog, so I don’t want to repeat myself too much but there is no concrete, agreed-upon definition of what is a language and what is a dialect. This is all completely arbitrary. However, the only actual use of all this “triple negatives and ‘I be doing’ are as legitimate a way of speaking as any other” is to push the people who talk like this to the very bottom of the job market. I believe that it is morally indefensible to let children speak in Spanglish or in any comparable version of English.
We have a bunch of smug, self-satisfied linguists at my school who keep speechifying on how “it’s a language like any other” when we have so many students who are dropping out because they have no idea how to speak, let alone write in the language that will get them employed. But yes, it sounds very liberal and lofty to say that there is no correct English. I have only a slightest accent in English, and already half of the people I meet don’t understand me. I don’t even want to imagine what life is like when you don’t have a bunch of degrees to stick into people’s faces when they turn their noses at your non-standard way of speaking.
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I guess I learned how to write from phonics? I don’t remember whole word spelling to be honest. I never seriously studied for spelling tests; I just knew how to spell the words from seeing them so many times? My teachers also made me diagram sentences back in the day.
Spelling in English is so idiosyncratic that I think whole language teaching would be a disaster. I think a lot of primary school education is just rote memorization, and if it’s difficult for you it’s a world of pain.
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English grammar is ridiculously easy — and also easy to make minor mistakes in, but unlike most languages, minor mistakes don’t alter the meaning — but the pronunciation, never mind the spelling, is nonsensical.
Do these words actually rhyme?
Dough/low/so
Rough/buff
Weigh/say/hey
Light/bite
Fear/here
Bone/known
Are these words pronounced the same?
Led/lead
Lead/lede
Red/read
Read/reed
Sow/sew/so
Site/sight/cite
Sea/see/”C”
Here/hear
There/their/ they’re
Whose’s/whose
Ball/bawl
Lone/loan
And these words differently?
Read/read
Lead/lead
Wind/wind
Bass/bass
Desert/desert
Bow/bow
Minute/minute
Doe/do (musical)
It’s a good thing that English was my first language — and that my mother was both an English teacher and an unsympathetic karate expert who gave her son a judo chop every time he made a mistake in pronunciation or in grammar — or I’d never have learned my native language correctly.
Compared to English, learning my second and third languages (German and Italian — both rigidly controlled within their grammatical and pronunciation frameworks) — was quite easy.
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“..and that my mother was both an English teacher and an unsympathetic karate expert who gave her son a judo chop every time he made a mistake”
Wow.
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But as you say, the grammar in English is so easy that no other language I know of can compare.
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” the grammar in English is so easy that no other language I know of can compare”
It’s easy to become communicative in English. It’s very hard to become really fluent. A low barrier to entry usually means a high barrier to mastery.
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In English, the problem is the extremely high idiomatic content and the rate at which the vocabulary grows. Many language learners are lost in conversations with English speakers because they are not prepared for the high number of idioms.
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My grandchildren are all doing fine in the Seattle public school system. The three eldest were reading and writing before age six, having learned most of the basics in preschool and kindergarten. The younger one is coming along, getting ready to roll. Their math is quite good, too.
The eldest, at 13, is already doing college freshman level research papers. Nobody worries or obsesses about any of this. We just expect that our kids will do well, and they do.
We are educated people!
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You might be thinking of the Initial Teaching Alphabet which was tried for a time in the UK. I think the idea was if the children learned a simpler system first then the initial reading skills would transfer to standard English orthography….. It didn’t work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
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Our (now very successful college-student) kids learned how to read at home, but were also exposed to a variety of reading and writing approaches at school.
I was very dubious about the “write and spell the way it sounds” idea, until I realized that it can be really, really useful for younger kids. It can help young, novice writers feel confident about the general concept and process of thinking up stuff to say, and then sharing it with others by writing it down (spelling be damned). See Dreidel’s list of English spelling nonsense for several dozen reasons why an early insistence on correct English spelling can be so intimidating for young writers.
That said, it’s really important that the “put it on the page and don’t worry about spelling” approach is supplemented by lots of interesting reading and by spelling instruction. And, somewhere in the mid-primary grades, the whole improvised-spelling approach needs to fade out (and this sometimes does not happen soon enough).
If you haven’t spent time with elementary students lately, I encourage you to do so. I may be a real eye opener. There are a large number of kids that do not read with confidence and who find writing frustrating, painful and, therefore, pointless. Why this is so is open for discussion. (My amateur theory—based on observation—is that a shocking percentage of adults/parents never read for pleasure and do not encourage reading or writing with their kids.) In any case, any strategy that can break through the “I don’t like to write” barrier can be useful. But, like all pedagogic approaches, teaching and learning are never one size fits all; teachers that adopt only one strategy or approach to the subject are usually not the most effective at reaching all their students.
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Yes to: “like all pedagogic approaches, teaching and learning are never one size fits all; teachers that adopt only one strategy or approach to the subject are usually not the most effective at reaching all their students.”
Sharing one’s school experiences can make for interesting conversation but using one’s own educational experience as a starting point to making pronouncements about best educational practices and policies is a surefire way to get it wrong. The world is a bigger place than any one person’s experience. Very many people are not at all like you.
And yes to: “It can help young, novice writers feel confident about the general concept and process of thinking up stuff to say, and then sharing it with others by writing it down (spelling be damned).”
Just as we do not expect young children to draw anywhere near realistically (e.g., stick figures), I don’t think we should expect young children to start out writing everything correctly. The stage of using one’s own spelling system can be a short but productive one.
My anecdote on the subject of novice writers is this: When my son was beginning first grade, I shared my alarm with his teacher over my observation that he was drawing some of his letters backwards. She smiled and said, “A lot of people in room 203 do that. It’s a stage they outgrow.” Now if any student continued to draw letters backwards after a certain point, I am sure she would have referred the student for testing for learning differences. But otherwise, it was as ridiculous as worrying that a beginner walker had neurological issues because they kept stumbling and falling.
Anyway, if I had a young child about to enter the public school, I would be a lot more worried about all the high-stakes testing and all the teaching to the test they were about to experience than the school’s approaches to teaching LArts.
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“Anyway, if I had a young child about to enter the public school, I would be a lot more worried about all the high-stakes testing and all the teaching to the test they were about to experience than the school’s approaches to teaching LArts.”
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“If you haven’t spent time with elementary students lately, I encourage you to do so. I may be a real eye opener. There are a large number of kids that do not read with confidence and who find writing frustrating, painful and, therefore, pointless. Why this is so is open for discussion.”
“(My amateur theory—based on observation—is that a shocking percentage of adults/parents never read for pleasure and do not encourage reading or writing with their kids.)”
Absolutely. If they never see a parent with a book, how can they be expected to want to pick up a book and read?
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I didn’t do phonics as a child, but I’m also fairly certain I never did the whole reading thing, either. I mostly learned to read on my own, once I found something I was interested in. That said, I learned spelling very much the same way I learned reading. I was also very good with word games, which probably helped.
In school, I remember that if you didn’t know how to spell something, you were told to try spelling it based on how it sounded. The idea was to associate the sound with the letters. But we also had a section of the day devoted to “word study,” in which we learned about words and letters and spelling and how they all worked. So creative spelling was never actually encouraged as an end-all-be-all–we also learned how words were actually spelled, after which the correct spelling was given clear preference over the creative spelling. At home I also had a dictionary to use, though often my “how do you spell this?” was answered by a “how do you think you spell it?” To which I would take to the dictionary in frustration and maybe eventually find the word I was looking for.
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“We have a bunch of smug, self-satisfied linguists at my school who keep speechifying on how “it’s a language like any other” when we have so many students who are dropping out because they have no idea how to speak, let alone write in the language that will get them employed. ”
Well of course people in the US who want jobs have to be able to use GAE (General American English). A person who is monolingual in AAVE is going to face severe restrictions and I can’t imagine anyone who isn’t stupid or evil wanting to foster such a situation. But millions of American blacks are effectively bilingual switching back and forth depending on the situation. There’s no rational reason that can’t be the norm.
Unfortunately for complicated historical reasons the US school system is terrible at teaching the standard and not shaming children while doing so.
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“But millions of American blacks are effectively bilingual switching back and forth depending on the situation. There’s no rational reason that can’t be the norm.”
The only reason is that there are lazy teachers who excuse their refusal to teach these kids with endless talk about languages and dialects and the crucial importance of both. If a student switches between the two versions, that’s great. But there are so many who have nothing to switch to.
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Wow, this thread has gone all over the map. Getting back to whole language: WL was a 1980s thing which has had a lasting impact in schools. The original idea was to mimic the inherent human learning process — children learn to speak words before they learn how to write them. Early WL extremists believed that WL should be taught to the exclusion of phonetics. However, some smarter educators realized that a blended approach would be better, and indeed that did produce better results.
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Learning to read and write is an emotional subject for everybody because these are the skills that integrate us into the world of signs.
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Based on what I see how my kids are taught, there is an education stage called “writing with invented spelling.” It’s somewhere between pre-K to 1st grade. It helps kids learn the connection between the sounds that letter make and their spelling. I think it’s pretty useful, for most consonants anyways, even if not as useful as it would be in the languages that are more phonetic. My 3rd grader spells perfectly now and they do have spelling drills (here are the words of the week this week — “im” prefix and high frequency words: impossible, impatient, imperfect, impulsivity…) But I still vividly remember the invented spelling words in K or 1st grade. I think it gives the kids confidence to express themselves in writing and it’s wicked hilarious! But the point it is when they spell it phonetically you can tell what they mean (hence builds confidence) and there really are more rules in English spelling than we nonnative speakers from more phonetic backgrounds are perhaps willing to admit. Overall, I have been quite pleased with the teaching of spelling and basic mechanics (capitalization, punctuation, etc.), the teachers do a good job here (I do live in a state with good public schools, though).
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Yes, that’s the method I was asking about, precisely. Very interesting.
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