Mark W.F. Condon: Blog

I’m an average speller. I was taught phonics well it appears (though the nuns used Dick and Jane) and I write enough that I know when a word doesn’t “look right.”

What I was never taught was what to do next.

I KNOW it isn’t spelled right…or I think not anyway. I look the word up under the several possible spellings I can think of and find it, insert it into my writing and go my merry way…until the next time. There it is again! That word I always misspell. Why can’t I remember how to spell it!?

Well, I have a solution. If I can spell a word like it SOUNDS and it looks wrong, there is usually just one tricky part that is throwing me. So I try to use mnemonics - memory tricks - to remember how to get past that part. With some words I learn to pronounce the part emphatically, like: FebRUary, WEDnesday and SepaRATe. With others, I focus down on the particular part of the word that is the problem and try to burn it into my memory. But for others, I can’t find the handle. Especially those that sound like the end of DUNCE. There are lots of words that have the letters -ance or -ence at the end and I cannot for the life of me remember a rule or a mnemonic for which is which. Independence, appliance, abstinence, performance. It’s a crap shoot!

But I do know that I don’t know and that’s a start. So what I rely on is just how they look. Recently I pulled into the driveway of a house I’d visited several dozen time, but hadn’t been over there for awhile. As I pulled in, I said to myself…something doesn’t look right here. I was so disoriented I checked to see if I had pulled into the wrong driveway. It turns out that the house next door had lost two huge trees in the back yard from a wind storm, trees that threw a special kind of wonderful shade on the house I was visiting. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was wrong.

It’s the same with spelling. It looks “funny” if it’s wrong…but it only looks funny if I have encountered the word enough to know in some vague way how it ought to look.

WHAT IS HE TALKING ABOUT!?

Well, my point here is that the tricky part of spelling is that teaching it directly is a humongo pain and drain. 12 years of school with a spelling test every Friday…let’s see…36 weeks a year, times 12 years… that’s over 430 tests, not to mention the time it took to “present” the week’s words, and to study and review them (too often writing out arcane and useless definitions to go with them). Yikes! And I still have words I have to stop to think about how to spell!

So, how ELSE might we learn to spell? Well, two very natural ways of teaching spelling are to get kids reading stuff they love and writing a lot for people they care about. Under these circumstances, they encounter words with challenging spellings in their natural habitats. Thoughtful teachers can then invites kids to share new words or call the words to kids attention AS they encounter them. Just take a few minutes to consider how the pronunciation doesn’t help and LOOK at the tricky part. Not only will spelling become a FUNCTIONAL part of reading and writing, but look at all the hours kids will spend reading and writing that they might not have were they preparing for a test all those years.

...and of course getting this kind of literacy into place in schools where spelling instruction hasn’t changed since they put in the radiators is the other tricky part.