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CAN YOUR STUDENTS SPELL?

So here you are again, wading elbow-deep through another semester's crop
of students' written work and noticing just how many papers are marred

by bogus spellings. Some papers merely have the odd pardonable error but
others are besmirched with omitted letters, bloated syllables, fractured
affixes and muddled homonyms. In the worst cases there seems to be at
least one word per sentence unfathomably choreographed.

Yes, we all know that the orthography of English words looks chaotic and
everyone has lamented how pathetically unphonetic is the spelling of words
such as bough, cough, through and tough. But in fact the system is far
more regular and logical than it appears. The vast majority of our words
are spelled using a consistent correspondence between sounds and symbols,
and irregularities, where they do arise, are frequently predictable or
else are deliberately designed to maintain morphological relationships.
For example, "sign" appears to have a silent letter g, but if it were spelled
without it (as "sine") its shape would lose its connection with signal,
signify and signature where the g is pronounced. Similarly, "resign" is
related to resignation and "design" to designate and designation. The
spelling retains these relationships to the meaning group and assists the
reader's eye to recognize the word.

 

There can be many reasons why students spell badly. Poor writing habits,

impoverished reading experience, inattentiveness to lexical detail, mis-

application of "rules" and confused phonetics are some of the major culprits.
Yet none of these need continue unabated to hinder a student's quality

of written presentation or to annoy you essay after essay. Your marking

pen need not run dry so frequently. Misspellers can be helped to see the
ways of their errors -- not by the boredom of learning endless word lists

nor by the tedium of copying out correct spellings ad nauseam, but by having
students inductively learn how the system of English spelling works, what
linguistic cues are available, what phonological principles are operating

and which spelling generalizations are useful. The spell can be taken

out of spelling.

Some of the responsibility, however, is yours. Now is an opportune time

to notice which of your students are in an orthographic muddle and to quietly Oo
advise them to take remedial action. You might suggest that they consider

taking next semester one of the following ABE courses available at the

college to assist students improve their spelling: