PSU Magazine Winter 1998

them lots of opportunities to write in the early grades, and correct spelling will eventually fo llow. WLlde found that emphasizing correctness too early in their education tends to be inhibiting. "The focus on correctness, for the mo t part, produces nonwriters," she says. She ha a po int. When Ian wa in second grade, he wrote several "books" on his own about things he was inter– ested in at the time: martial arts, the army, and this one about how to make an arrow: Take a rock. Brake rock. Chissull the rock to the shape you wont yur aero hed. Finde a strong stik. Poot the botum flap of rock on stik . Then tie string orawnd stik and rock fap . Yru dun with the aeroe. Did I care about the spelling? No, I was too busy beaming with pride over the fact that he found writing fun . Ah, but second grade is gone and we're struggling with third, and the dreaded weekly spelling Ii t. Wilde has a problem with lists. Required spelling textbook s are virtu– ally a thing of the past, which Wilde says is all for the good. But teachers till feel compelled to dole out long lists of spelling words that are either too hard , or that have little or no connection with what a child has been reading or writing. Wilde believes a child shouldn't be expected to learn more than three to five words a week. Anything more than that is too hard for most kids to memorize, and even if they do memo– rize more than five words for a te t, their retention is likely to be low. The words a child does learn should be one that he sees and writes on a regu– lar basi . Wilde likes the idea of chil– dren making their own personal lists, based on words they see and use often . "Formal cla s lists don't have much value. It make more sense to have pelling grounded in reading and writ– ing," he says. If a child mis es 10 out of 15 words on a pretest, don't have the child try to learn the words with the grossest misspellings. Concentrate instead on the ones that are off by only a letter or two. If all else fa ils, Wilde says, go back to the books-literally. Strong readers tend to be trong peller , he ays. And the more a child reads, the less he or she will have to depend on memorization to spell correctly. The learning proces for spelling is different than for other more logical subjects, uch a math. Math is a non-arbitrary body of knowledge; it has inviolable rule . pelling-e pecially to a child just leaming-i a mi hma h of connections in which almost every rule has an exception. Blame it on English. The language is a multicolored tapestry, a "crafty hybrid," in the words of Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil in their book The Story of English: "In the simplest terms, the language was brought to Britain by Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, influenced by Latin and Greek when St. Augustine and his fo llowers converted England to Christianity, subtly enriched by the Dane , and finally transformed by the French– speaking Normans." And that just takes us up to the 12th century A.D. As the language evolved, English dialect and accents sprung up in vari– ous parts of the world , creating a widening gap between spelling and pronunciation. Ever wonder about the way we spell knife? Wilde ays the word u ed to be pronounced "kaneefa" in old England. The p in words like psychology used to be pronounced (as it was in the original Greek and still is in French ), she says. G iven the English language's maddening incon i tencie , it comes as no surprise that the average third– grader is going to have trouble spelling such simple words as would, rough, and climb. Wilde illustrates her point with George Bernard Shaw, who once said that, given the odd ways in which the English combine letter , fis h could logically be spelled ghoti: gh as in laugh, o as in women , and ti a in nation . So take it from a father in spelling purgatory: lighten up. As Wilde herself points out, even Shakespeare pelled his name more than one way. D (John Kirkland is a Portland-based writer. He used a spell checker in preparing this article .) So, how good a speller are you? Each of the following 20 words is shown in its correct form and in one or more popular misspellings. The list is drawn from "An Acid Test of Spelling Ability" in the book Correct Spelling Made Easy by Norman Lewis. l. (a) embarrassment, (b) embarassment, (c) embarrassement. 2. (a) sieze, (b) seize 3. (a) allotted, (b) alotted, (c) alloted 4. (a) di sipate, (b) disippate, (c) di sapate 5. (a) occurance, (b) occurrance, (c) occurrence 6. (a) chagrined, (b) chagrinned 7. (a) inoculate, (b) innoculate, (c) inocculate 8. (a) occa ional, (b) occasional 9. (a) iridescent, (b) irredescent, (c) irridescent 10. (a) seive, (b) sieve 11. (a) superintendant, (b) superintendent 12. (a) perseverance, (b) perserverance, (c) perseverence 13. (a) inadvertant, (b) inadvertent 14. (a) eparate, (b) seperate 15. (a) mathamatics, (b) mathematic 16. (a) indispensible, (b) indespensable, (c) indispensable 1 7. (a) hairbrained, (b) harebrained 18. (a) nickle, (b) nickel 19. (a) benifited, (b) benefitted, (c) benefited 20. (a) heros, (b) heroes q -·oz '.) -·61 q -·~n q -·L1 '.) -·91 q -·~1 e -·VT q -·n e -·z1 q -·n q -·01 e -·6 q -·g e -·L e -·9 '.) -·~ e -·t e -·£ q -·z e -·1 :SJ;;!MSUV WINTER 1998 PSU MAGAZINE 11