Are we ignoring what poor spelling skills could be telling us?
My posting on spelling and grammar prompted a lot of comments, including this thoughtful email from a high school teacher.
With the teacher’s permission, here is the note:
I don’t respond to blog posts with emails very frequently but I thought I’d take the time to respond to your spelling and writing post from Dec. 3rd because it resonates with me closely. Only a few of your commenters approached the issue in the same way that I do: that phonics, spelling, and grammar absolutely must have a place in today’s classroom all the way through 12th grade, not because it’s “right” or “correct” but because it’s good teaching!
In order to help explain how I ended up with that position, I’d love to share my story as a new language arts teacher. Last year was my first year teaching. Sometime in January, after a whole fall semester of trial and error, I came to teaching vocabulary skills through using prefixes, roots, and suffixes.
I wanted to start off the new strategy with some easy words so I picked bio as my first root word. The first word: biology, the study of life. Every student in my class knew the definition of biology and that “ology” means “the study of.” That’s pretty much lesson one of biology class and my students aced it.
The next word: microbiology. Not a single student could tell me what it meant. Crickets. Somehow adding a prefix confused them so much that they could not determine what this new word meant even though it contained the word we just discussed previously. Something was terribly wrong.
Back in grad school we discussed the concept of a “schema,” which means, basically, a framework or pattern applied to something. My students’ schema for words was to treat them as a whole piece. When I added micro to the front of biology, I confused them because, from their point of view, I had created an entirely new word.
It’s as if I added another angle to a triangle and created a square. The problem is, that’s not how words work. Words have constituent parts which contribute to their meaning. My students were missing out on a major piece of their literacy because they were seeing words as a whole, unchangeable unit.
Not only does this have implications for their reading comprehension (How on earth can they figure out new, unfamiliar words if they can’t determine prefix,root, suffix?) but it also makes the task of writing much harder because they have no strategies for generating new words to fit their intended meaning.
When writing, suffixes are especially important because they determine the part of speech and tense of a verb. How many students go through years of instruction and never have subject/verb agreement? We tend to think it’s a matter of practice-makes-perfect. I think it’s a matter of teaching the nature of words.
Oh, you know what else? These were 9th grade students, 14-and 15-year-old kids who were completely unaware of a major component of the English language.
It should come as no surprise that they were also terrible spellers. Now, I have to pause and get on to you a little bit here, Maureen. Your examples from the presentation, it’s and its, are not misspelled. They are misused. And that’s a world of difference when you’re in my position and have to figure out where each kid’s language breakdown is occurring.
My students (and this is equally true of my current crop of 9th grade students) were at a total loss when it came to reading and spelling most words longer than two syllables. Some of my students were in even worse shape. I had and have students who don’t realize that vowels in the English language make two different sounds, long and short. Many of my students couldn’t tell me why the letter C sounds like an /s/ sometimes and a /k/ other times.
The root cause of spelling errors isn’t spellcheck. It isn’t using too much text messaging shorthand. It’s a lack of phonics knowledge. Letters make sounds. There are rules for why letters make those sounds. If you know the rules, you can spell anything. Most adults came of age in a world where their teachers were very prescriptive about spelling and grammar. Even without the schools pushing it, students acquire language skills naturally through their interaction with family and friends.
This is one of the reasons why reading with young kids is so important: you’re inculcating the rules which govern our language. Unfortunately, many students don’t have that in their lives. When a student misses out on the chance to develop an understanding of phonics “organically,” the schools have to pick up the slack.
But are schools going “back to basics”? Are they looking for students who miss out on the foundations of good literacy? I don’t know. After a year and a half, I can’t say for certain that there’s a system in place to target these students. That’s why I feel like I have to do it in my class; I can’t depend on the school system to meet their needs adequately prior to walking in my door every August.
I think we instinctively avoid mentioning these deficiencies and instead point to how impressed we are by the content. Presenters would rather talk about how impressive their students are from an analytic standpoint. I know I would. But spelling and writing are a window into each student’s understanding of our language. We can learn just as much from their spelling and grammar as we can from their content and analysis and teachers shouldn’t shy away from the hard truths.
If we don’t take the time to teach spelling and writing, how will we ever hope to improve those skills? Do they just appear magically? Next time you see a student misspelling words, look closely at what she is misspelling.
Is it just a mistake or a sign of a larger literacy problem?
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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113 comments Add your comment
Private Citizen
December 6th, 2012
12:53 pm
Maybe the doctor can go out in the woods and find some leaves and grind them up for you and make a paste so you can get medical treatment on the Georgia Plantation. They’ll tell you you’re all better now and you’ll believe it.
Private Citizen
December 6th, 2012
1:16 pm
Detailed list in English of medical operation services from Hong Kong public health authority: http://www.ha.org.hk/visitor/ha_view_content.asp?content_id=204748&ver=HTML
Lots of verbs (doing) and nouns, spelled correctly. English and Chinese are Hong Kong’s two official languages.
Just Sayin.....
December 6th, 2012
1:37 pm
American English is a clusterfart of words. For every rule there are a number of exceptions.
I think most readers, and the OP’s letter, figured out that this is a problem when phonics is NOT used. Too much reliance on sight reading whole words leaves children unable to truly pick apart and analyze words. Yes, phonics often leads to incorrect results. But everyone for a very long time used phonics successfully, and that group of people had better grammar and spelling skills. We have continued on this path long enough to realize that the “sight reading whole words” method is INFERIOR. It’s a grand experiment that has failed (much like the “new math”, grouping kids of all abilities together in the same class and teaching to the lowest common denominator, etc).
Just Sayin.....
December 6th, 2012
1:43 pm
You want to know why are kids’ skills are deteriorating? This:
I think this teacher is to young to know what is important. What is important is what the student is saying. Today with spell and grammar check let’s just really encourage kids to get their feelings and knowlege on paper without fear of spelling and grammar errors. Errors can be fixed once the thoughts are on paper. This teacher seems to be a throw back to when I was in school 30 years ago.
James
December 6th, 2012
1:51 pm
Dr. Henson, I think it is educators like you who are part of the problem and indeed perpetuate it. If a student in the class knew the answer, they should have spoken up, period. We have to stop coddling children. I suspect that lots of people would argue about “social stigmas” of being the “smart” or “nerd” child, but it’s neither here nor there in this example. Someone should have spoken up if they knew the correct answer.
GOB
December 6th, 2012
2:21 pm
Private Citizen,
It appears that I unwittingly touched a nerve with you. To your first comment about teaching conditions and requirements, rest assured that I am fully aware of what teachers are required to do. I wrote that comment while my freshmen students were at lunch, and writing this one briefly during my planning. I, in fact, have a large stack of essays on my desk to grade (which I will start momentarily).
I’m not sure if you truly understood the point I was making, as your reaction doesn’t seem to be in line with what I said. My argument is very simple. This is a generational argument that is not new and will continue for generations to come. I also clearly stated that there is a certain level that must be understood in order for students to learn. You can’t build a house without a foundation.
The language will continue to evolve and change as it has always done, so much of the distress about how kids write and speak today is not as much an issue of learning (although there is certainly some of that, as always) as it is a generational gap between adults and students.
To handwriting, this is a concern, but has little to do with spelling and language. Good handwriting takes practice, and is a function of motor skills. It can be frustrating when students have poor handwriting, but I’m sure long ago it was frustrating for Fred Flinstone when Pebbles couldn’t chisel in straight lines.
As to your comments about Latin, it doesn’t apply to this conversation because no one speaks Latin as their primary language. It is a writing language, so evolution has stopped. Also, as the discussion is about school kids, I’m not sure where the doctor comment came from. If I were looking for medical advice from my students, I’d have bigger concerns than their handwriting or spelling.
Decaturite
December 6th, 2012
2:42 pm
20% of children have some form of dyslexia. The remediation is an evidence-based intervention like Orton-Gillingham, Lindamood-Bell, or Wilson program. As a lay person, just a parent, I can say that those methods seem an awful lot like phonics, word-attack strategies, sounding out words, the opposite of whole language programs. If evidence-based, multisensory, rigorous reading programs were authentically implemented in public schools, all children would benefit. Dyslexic children would learn to read before they developed a pattern of failure and falling behind. Non-dyslexic children would learn to read faster and have better literacy and linguistics skills. Public schools would have less kids on IEPs and need less special ed teachers needed for otherwise bright and talented kids with reading disabilities. Too many public schools in Metro Atlanta, including some premier systems, have a mish-mosh of reading instruction, a little of this, a little of that, “depending on what the student needs” (based on what science?) not a rigorously designed and implemented curriculum. Then they try to skimp on special ed services for children who seem bright but are struggling with reading. They do not have a good understanding of the neuroscience behind reading disabilities and the savings they would incur in services if they used an evidence-based, multisensory reading curriculum and implemented it faithfully, not as a part of a goulash of instructional techniques.
For those teachers, parents, and others interested in learning more about dyslexia and effective reading instruction, look into the Georgia Branch of the International Dyslexia Society. It is hosting a great conference that lots of area teachers, parents, and clinicians can attend:
Friday and Saturday, February 1 & 2, 2013
Dimensions of Dyslexia Southern Regional Conference
Cobb Galleria Centre
Atlanta, GA
I’ve attended this before and found it highly informative and useful.
bootney farnsworth
December 6th, 2012
2:43 pm
we KNOW the ability of students to express themselves clearly and in english has declined.
we KNOW there is an undercurrent (this is not new) of anti education in many parts of society.
we KNOW pop culture has reinforced all these failings as trendy and keeping it real.
we KNOW the administrative culture has adopted a don’t teach them, test them mentality.
to say we’re ignoring these issues is to do a disservice to “ignoring”. we are flat out, actively pursuing this result.
bootney farnsworth
December 6th, 2012
2:45 pm
there is a constant theme of self esteem of students, and not damaging it by catching and correcting these fixable mistakes.
if we have the courage to make them feel bad now, we’ll spare them the humiliation of being and feeling like a moron later.
MANGLER
December 6th, 2012
2:50 pm
OK, to each and every one of you who thinks that spelling and grammar fall short to “expressing yourself” – go sit in the corner and think about what you did. No really. Have you ever read an employment application or resume which had spelling errors on it or that contained grammatical deficiencies? I have, and do frequently. Guess what. Their “ideas” tend to get discarded because of mistakes like that. Where is the bottom? Where is the minimum requirement that you will place on your children and on yourselves? Being able to comprehend a sentence, as well as being able to construct one, are paramount to anybodies success. Reading your comments suggesting that minimal linguistic skills are of less importance than getting the thought on paper regardless of how it is communicated is one of the most illogical arguments I think I’ve ever heard. Do you need perfect penmanship? Likely not. However, you need to be able to write and spell.
Maureen Downey
December 6th, 2012
3:22 pm
@Paulo, I did not moderate you. If you are a first-time poster to this blog, your comments go into moderation automatically. (This is why all the late-night comments from Emory students earlier this week ended up in moderation.)
If you are not new to posting, then somehow your post set off the automatic filter. In any event, I have released your post but I did not put your comment in moderation.
Maureen
Kat
December 6th, 2012
3:31 pm
Errors abound at schools, and the parents aren’t helping! Too many “minor” mistakes! If you can’t spell, and the principal approves all communications, then someone needs help somewhere. It’s awful to have to explain a newsletter to my kids. “Yes, they wrote it wrong, but people make mistakes.” Apparently, a lot of them.
Oh, I also hate it when companies try to be cute and write it “Skool.” Ugh!
Truth in Moderation
December 6th, 2012
4:04 pm
@MANGLER
“Being able to comprehend a sentence, as well as being able to construct one, are paramount to anybodies success.”
While I am in total agreement with your post, please practice what you preach.
Should be “anybody’s success”
Dekalbite
December 6th, 2012
4:35 pm
Having taught upwards of a thousand gifted students, I can say they are notoriously poor spellers. IMHO – this is because they rarely learn to read using phonics. They have very good vocabularies and when they are very young, they can look at a word and hear it spoken and commit its written form to memory. They quickly have a thousand or more sight words at their command, and their large vocabulary ensures they understand the meaning of those words. That’s when they begin to read books as power readers. Since they are proficient in MOST of the words in the lower level books, when they encounter a word in a sentence they do not understand, they can glance at the first letter and make a pretty good guess what it is. Chances are that new sight word is already in their mental vocabulary so they now commit it to memory. Even if it’s not in their mental vocabulary, they still may add it as a sight word and understand the meaning just because of its context in a sentence or in the story.
Gifted students read the way all adults who are fluent readers read. How many of you have seen a word you can’t pronounce, but you have read it so many times you know what it means? For example, I read the word consanguinity in a novel the other day and am not sure how to pronounce it, but I knew it had to do with how close in kinship two people are simply because I could place it in context in the sentence.
This is great for reading but awful for spelling. Fortunately for most of us in our 60s (gifted and non gifted – with me being in the former category), we were required to learn phonics and spelling was always taught by phonics and patterns and frameworks as the writer of this post cites. My mother, now in her 90s, was not taught phonics. She went to first grade at 5 years old and “sight” reading was having a heyday. She is a great reader, but a terrible speller and couldn’t “sound out” a word if her life depended on it. My daughter in her 20s and gifted had practically no phonics instructions since she went straight to reading chapter books by the beginning of first grade due to the accumulation of so many “sight” words. She has struggled with spelling her entire life and has no skills at “sounding out” a word she has not heard before.
Lack of phonics is not the only problem we have in this day and age. Spellcheck has made students lazy and adults as well.
Dekalbite
December 6th, 2012
4:39 pm
“Fortunately for most of us in our 60s (gifted and non gifted – with me being in the former category), ”
Should read:
“Fortunately for most of us in our 60s (gifted and non gifted – with me being in the LATTER category…..)
…..I am NOT gifted and was never in the “fast” reading group. I slogged along with phonics and word patterns and lots of practice. Reading may have come slowly to me, but phonics ensured I can just about spell anything.
Truth in Moderation
December 6th, 2012
4:43 pm
“To handwriting, this is a concern, but has little to do with spelling and language.”
I beg to differ. A good phonics curriculum teaches handwriting along with spelling and phonics. Seeing a letter, sounding it out, and writing it at the same time helps to get the information into the brain through three different pathways. The likelihood that the information will stick is much greater. All of mine learned the long and short vowel sounds and all of the hard consonant sounds while learning to print the letters. This was done at age four. At age five, they learned cursive writing while continuing with more advanced phonics rules. By the end of pre-K 5 they could read words with short vowels and were beginning to apply the two-vowel rule. By the end of first grade, they could read most any word and continued to work on reading comprehension, vocabulary, and spelling.
The Reverend Baby Doctor Bedpan
December 6th, 2012
4:53 pm
You need to pass this along to some of your fellow bloggers…..Especially the Falcons beat writer. The guy is a lawyer who’s prose and discourse is tantamount to a 5th grader.
Amy Rice
December 6th, 2012
5:00 pm
From the original post:
“I don’t respond to to blog posts with emails…”
“to to”??? Am I the only one who noticed this? How ironic is it that this type of error was in this particular column, situated in a blog focused on education quality? And placed in the column’s first sentence, no less.
I realize that she may have quickly typed and submitted this missive, Maureen. However, this isn’t the first time that I have seen you print something from a teacher that had writing errors, both grammatical and spelling.
However, the points she makes are very good and have true merit.
kate
December 6th, 2012
5:09 pm
I just turned in my grades — I teach at a GA system university. Many did well, but those students who did not (98% were first year students new to college) had trouble reading, and therefore didn’t read much or at all. Many weren’t bashful about letting me know that, either. I do GRE prep courses and I too find they don’t know prefixes/suffixes, etc. They shut down and cannot try to reason out what a word might mean (even enough to figure out if it fits in the model of the analogy used in the GRE question).
Unfortunately – most of higher ed is geared to reading tools. I had lots of things I could give them to read to help them learn, but when reading IS the problem, college becomes harder. I tried some youTube and iTunes lessons in my discipline, but again, not sure many used them.
Spelling and writing and reading are foundational. We ignore them at our students’ peril.
Maureen Downey
December 6th, 2012
5:19 pm
@Amy, Good catch and now fixed.
Maureen
Georgia
December 6th, 2012
5:27 pm
Our language is undergoing transformation via twittter and texting. You can’t mispell words when you abreviate or make them up.
Private Citizen
December 6th, 2012
5:59 pm
kate, interesting post. I recently had a most interesting experience. I tutored a lady in math for an online course. When i first worked with her she was a shambles, timid, unsure, lost on basics. Meanwhile, the course was pretty demanding, algebra, geometry, and today I found out, probabilities. When I first worked with her, we met a few times, and then had to do a marathon session to salvage her grade for mid-term. I was really into her business, practically pounding my fist on the table, demanding that she makes the multiplication concrete, as many of the questions required a sequence of calculation and every step has to be correct to get the number to put into the box at the end. The online curriculum was not multiple choice. If the answer was 98.25, that’s what you had to put the in the box or it is not correct. We salvaged her mid-term grade and made a pretty good foundation. Then I did not hear from her for a couple of weeks. I thought the worst. I thought she had crashed and dropped the course, left the program. I thought I had scared her (scarred her?) and she was upset. I called twice and it took several days for her to return my call, which she did a day ago. I met with her today and she had skills with getting around on her computer (before, should could hardly log-in), she was telling me how to do things. Instead of me doing most of the work, I would begin a problem (paper and pencil) and tell her to finish it. She was confident and in good spirits and smiled a lot. When I made a mistake on a probability problem (some of them were advanced), she told me, “that’s okay. you’re doing well.” She currently has a “B” in the class and expects to pass, which was my initial concern. Point is, these students who are miles behind the curve, I think they need both time spent with them and somebody to really get it their business and shake up their patterns of doubt, frustration, blaming, rationalising etc. Maybe it helps that I’m reasonably solid in geometry and algebra, but I “laid down the law” and showed dedication to “how it is done.” I am genuinely surprised by the affirmation of her doing well and especially in her own comfort zone. If I “lay down the law” with a bunch of student zombies in the government school, the bosses want to retrain me. This is truth and fact and ‘I been there. But I’m just telling you what works. Adults in college who do not have skills are in a desperate situation. I tell them it is life and death and here’s how its done. In many college classes this would probably make for some students who would wine and complain to the dean, but other students would say, “Finally! Someone who care about me.”
true story: I had a college physics teacher who came in the room one time cracking a big long leather bullship on the floor. He was one of those who was not there to waste people’s time or his own. He did a lot of prepping students to successfully transfer into a demanding core program. He had good humor but he liked to keep the attention on point as we sequentially covered the physics problems in the course.
Private Citizen
December 6th, 2012
6:03 pm
The same physics teacher on the last day of class, he also gave us each a photocopied thousand dollar bill returned with our final.
Private Citizen
December 6th, 2012
6:05 pm
And the tuition for the class was a little over $200. 4 courses, 800 bucks and some change. And I’m not a dinosaur, either. It wasn’t all that long ago.
Private Citizen
December 6th, 2012
6:08 pm
PS yes I an furious about how colleges have been turned into debt mills. And professor, who are you working for? the bank or the common good? because the bank has figured out how to make you work for them and they don’t even have to pay you. They ought to just take down the Georgia State and UGA signs and put up “Wachovia!”
Private Citizen
December 6th, 2012
6:15 pm
A few typos. meh. Should read “bullwhip.” You know, like this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNKPIOelTgA
Jake
December 6th, 2012
6:40 pm
“Georgia
December 6th, 2012
5:27 pm
Our language is undergoing transformation via twittter and texting. You can’t mispell words when you abreviate or make them up.”
You’re the only one that posted the real truth. Goodness . . .some wrote books in their replies to this blog but failed to take notice to the real problem. Texting is the problem.
RLD
December 6th, 2012
7:22 pm
As a twenty-four year veteran English instructor, I’ve come to the decision that spelling is obviously a gift. I’m from the phonics generation, and I also recall having to write spelling words ten times each before we were given a spelling test. I hated it, but by the time I had written the word six times, I knew the spelling. There’s nothing wrong with parents having their children to write words that they find difficult to spell multiple times at home, especially if doing so is not required in school. Writing words multiple times could possibly enhance the accuracy of their children’s spelling.
Masha Bell
December 7th, 2012
1:33 am
Phonics can teach children the basics of the English spelling system, but no more than that. What the endless mistakes of students tell us is that learning to write English is very difficult. And anyone who bothers to take a closer look at their errors, can easily see that they are due to the inconsistencies of English spelling. Students get into a muddle with irregularities like the different spellings for the ee sound in ’speak – speech, shriek, seize, scene’ which cause word-by-word memorisation of inconsistencies for at least 3,700 common words
http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2010/11/english-spelling-rules.html .
Worse still, some inconsistencies of English spelling make even learning to read exceptionally difficult, such as ‘on – only, once, other, woman, women’. English literacy acquisition is therefore far more challenging than that of Finnish which spells its 38 sounds with just 38 phonically completely reliable graphemes.
After 300+ years of complete neglect, making English spelling as simple as the Finnish orthography in one go would be difficult, but it could be made substantially more learner-friendly. But for this to happen, there needs to be greater understanding that English spelling irregularities are very costly
http://www.englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk/ .
peter mare
December 7th, 2012
1:54 am
Actually the issue is the spelling system, which is totally flawed! It is the worst system of all Western languages! Go to http://reforming-english.blogspot.ca/ for more info.
Maude
December 7th, 2012
7:34 am
It think Private Citizen has way to much time on their hands. If you define a child by their spelling skills you have missed most of the child!! I teach kindergarten and I wish I could share the writing my students do. It is rich and very creative and shows complex thinking that most people think a 5 year doesn’t have. when you teach a child to put their thoughts on paper without fear of spelling mistakes their mind is free. While you may not be able to read my students writing I can, they simply put down the sounds they hear in each word. It is rare that I have to ask a child what they were trying to say. I stand by my first post to define a child’s writing ability by their spelling skills is a throw back to years long past.
Maude
December 7th, 2012
7:36 am
To prove my point I ended up putting a “t” on the the first word of my post it should be I not It. If this were a child’s paper should the grade be lower by the simple mistake??
Private Citizen
December 7th, 2012
10:42 am
GOB, Your main point is a dismissal using generalization. same thing that every generation
Even at this moment I find it awkward to try and get in “the zone” with your comment. It is as though you have lost all meaning. This comment of yours sort of equates when someone says, “There is nothing we can do.” What it really means is that you are not hungry and that you live well. Maybe you think everyone else lives well, too. I mean, good for you, but we likely live with different demographics, perhaps even local / regional resources.
I am just curious, if I may ask. 1. Do any of your students within the last five years need eyeglasses and live without them as a sort of accepted reality?
2. Unrelated specifically to any of this, do you care to share the title of any literature / poem / story you’ve been working with, assigning? (this is so I can see what is going on outside of my own “bubble)(”up periscope”) Thanks.
Private Citizen
December 7th, 2012
10:53 am
One thing I am seeing in the comments is much emphasis on being loving to kids but that also it is acceptable for a job to be part way done. Many seem happy with so little on the intellectual side. It all seems warm and squishy. Meanwhile the Chinese are working in factories making dolls for us. To many of you, mastery of something is declared a throwback to the old days. A professor once used the term “intellectually lazy.” I do not think that is all of what is going on, but I think it applies here. Like so many thing, not sure what the answer is on a societal / macro level. It would be nice if people loved themselves along with their country and language.
MANGLER
December 7th, 2012
5:05 pm
Truth,
Thanks. Don’t you hate it when you go off on a rant and miss something silly like that? Happy Friday!
Pride and Joy
December 7th, 2012
5:57 pm
This teacher says it perfectly — so why don’t we know her name? There is nothing controversial about what she said.
I also disaagree with Cindy L. She says children are bad spellers because public libraries aren’t within reach of children in poverty. No child has to attend a public library to get a book. All the books they need are right around the corner from their classroom door — at the public school library. All American children have easy access to good libraries — right in their own school. The difference between good readers and good spellers and those who cannot read nor write well is that the schools do not emphasize the importance of it and many teachers, especially in APS, read and speak poorly.
When my children were at an APS school they regularly went to the library with all the other kids — they had a special time set up each week to go to the library.The issue was that the kids were allowed to play mindless video games on the computers in the library. No educational videos, just regular shoote em, kill em, bang em up video games.
The kids were just dumped into the library while the teachers were goodness only knows.
WHY?
Where is the emphasis on reading? A beautiful library full of books and time to read them and enjoy them but instead the kids were allowed to line up and fight over teh computers so they could play video games and guess who was the best players? The free lunch kids. They showed my children how to log on and get the videos. I don’t allow video games in my house…they learned how to play mindless video games AT SCHOOL from the KIDS who were “in poverty.”
I respect Cindy L but she is just flat our wrong when it comes to why children cannot read and spell well.
Pride and Joy
December 7th, 2012
6:18 pm
Globeflyer, my parents never read to me. They never got involved nor were they ever interested in me; however, I do enjoy reading and I am a pretty good speller and use grammar well.
What made a difference in my life? The teachers. I learned to read by using old-fashioned phonics. I learned the rules and the EXCEPTIONS to the rules later. For example, “i” before “e” except after “c” but what about the “p” in R E C E I P T?
My eighth grade English teacher did a great job teaching me by showing us how to diagram sentences. We practiced in class and at home for six weeks. It was a tremendous learning experience.
My classmates did the same. We were poor and went to a poor school. We learned grammar, spelling and punctuation because we had good teachers. It wasn’t because we had good parents or money or a public library.
Pride and Joy
December 7th, 2012
6:54 pm
I love the truth! “A good phonics curriculum teaches handwriting along with spelling and phonics. Seeing a letter, sounding it out, and writing it at the same time helps to get the information into the brain through three different pathways. The likelihood that the information will stick is much greater.”
YES ! YES ! YES!
We learn by hearing it, seeing it and DOING it.
Truth in Moderation
December 7th, 2012
9:24 pm
“While you may not be able to read my students writing I can, they simply put down the sounds they hear in each word.”
Should read:
While you may not be able to read my students writing, I can; they simply put down the sounds they hear in each word.”
Now I can read YOUR writing.
Roberta
December 8th, 2012
1:01 am
Maude, your class is exactly why we pulled our kids and now are home schooling. My Kinder is nearly blind in one eye, and has bad vision in the other eye. His morning was spent with ‘literacy activities’, then lunch, then ‘writers workshop’, followed by art, then FINALLY recess (and then math class). We tried preK to prepare him for a school environment. But sitting for most of the day writing was torture for him. Even his eye doc said he is just starting to have the visual ability to read and write. (which is typical, kids develop this skill between 4-6 years of age). Sadly, I saw other students in class struggling to make a circle. And yet, the Kinder teacher was pushing writing words. I taught Kinder years ago. The class was half day of fun, phonics songs, math games, and follow the leader games. We were up moving for most of the half day. We never had student desks. School was a place of joy. Now, school is all business and Georgia is at the bottom educationally. Yes, the early years are quite successful. But I think by 4th grade the kids are burnt out.
(and FYI — our guy who needed so much work at home on words and letters, is now reading a bit and can spell simple words. All in three months. And he ENJOYS to do his letter ladder. He even takes ’spelling tests’, which he does and does surprisingly good.)
Truth in Moderation
December 8th, 2012
1:05 am
The author wrote:
“I wanted to start off the new strategy with some easy words so I picked bio as my first root word. The first word: biology, the study of life. Every student in my class knew the definition of biology and that “ology” means “the study of.” That’s pretty much lesson one of biology class and my students aced it.
The next word: microbiology. Not a single student could tell me what it meant. Crickets. Somehow adding a prefix confused them so much that they could not determine what this new word meant even though it contained the word we just discussed previously. Something was terribly wrong.”
It just so happens that my 6th grader is currently studying how to classify insects. Today he had to learn/memorize the names of 8 orders of insects. At first the list seemed daunting: Orthoptera, Odonata, Coleoptera, Homoptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, Hemiptera, and Diptera. I then pointed out that all the words, except one, ended in “ptera”, which is Greek for “wings.” I reminded him that his favorite dinosaur is a pterodactyl, which has wings. Now the words looked much easier. All described different kinds of wings. All he needed to study was the prefixes and their meaning. “Ortho” means straight, like orthogonal lines, which my child is familiar with. “Coleo” means “sheath” or “covering.” Next, “Homo” means “same”, and we certainly hear that prefix frequently in the media. “Hymen” means “membrane” and Lepid means “scale.” The last two are easy; “Hemi” means half, as in hemisphere, and “Di” means “two” as in “diploid.” “Odonata” does not use the “ptera” root, but the “Odon” prefix and means “toothed,” just like the word “orthodontist.” Breaking the words down like this put my son at ease, and he had no trouble learning them.
Roberta
December 8th, 2012
1:13 am
As I posted above, we are home schooling. We pulled the kids, mainly because of our Kindergartener. But….. I have been quite disappointed with the 3rd grader’s spelling. It is TERRIBLE. And I am talking about misspelling words like “bake”. She said spelling didn’t matter, as her teacher doesn’t grade spelling on essays. We are using Emma Serl’s Primary Language Lessons which she should be flying through. But she is struggling with some of the lessons. She does not want to copy sentences nor spell the words correctly, she even ignores correct word use. She just wants to do creative writing (and again, don’t correct spelling or her grammar). She also loves a grammar workbook, as it is more fill in the blank, (get the work done and move on even if you know it or not — her words). Somewhere there is a happy middle. And somewhere she has learned creative writing is to be valued above spelling and grammar.
Truth in Moderation
December 8th, 2012
1:27 am
@ Roberta
The best phonics/reading/writing/spelling program is Abeka. They are advanced, so a third grader who has not had true phonics/spelling would need to start with their second grade language arts. She would not be bored. You can use their streaming video to see how their method works. There is nothing like it in the public schools. After a year with the videos, you could probably teach it yourself using their home school book based curriculum. It is great that your child is motivated to write. You should teach her that what she is doing is creating a “sloppy copy”, or first draft. With A Beka curriculum and workbooks, she can begin to learn to edit her work for an accurate final draft. If you don’t intervene now, she may not recover. Timing is critical.
http://www.abeka.com/ABekaOnline/ProductSearch.aspx?grade=G3&subject=&title=&sbn=
Elizabeth
December 8th, 2012
6:47 am
I completely agree with this article. I used to teach phonics( to my 9th graders!) and my kids were much better readers because I did. Sight reading causes exactly what the author says: kids look at words as a single, unchangeable unit and they can’t see the parts that make the whole. And as for not writing because you were “afraid” to make an error, times have changed. Believe me,most of today’s students don’t care about making mistakes because there are no consequences for making them and because they have have hubris ( pride) and too much self esteem. Yet they are much poorer readers and writers. Phonics and prefixes/ suffixes are critical parts of language development, and it does not take a linguist to teach them– just a literate English teacher who is well grounded in her subject ( as opposed to a generalist who specializes in nothing) and who teaches in most elementary/middle schools.
Private Citizen
December 8th, 2012
10:43 am
I’ve taught sentence diagramming and it was, like, out of 12 English teachers in the building, me and one other teacher were the only ones doing it. I recently resigned and the other teacher just quit due to the retirement / money thing. Well, we tried. Maybe some of students will one day see they were the last of the last as we put upon this them terrible thing called traditional instruction. It’s all going to be pushing buttons from here on out and if you want anything different, go private or be a home school freak who will forever be displaced due to have nothing in common with the regular peoples.
Private Citizen
December 8th, 2012
10:45 am
Gore Vidal said that with the Bush era and “New World Order,” the experiment known as the USA ended. I’m starting to think he was right.
Truth in Moderation
December 8th, 2012
11:20 am
“or be a home school freak who will forever be displaced due to have nothing in common with the regular peoples.”
Should read, “…due to having nothing in common.”
PC, your assertion has no bearing in my “real world” experience. In fact, they end up being the leaders, and have also been trained to volunteer and look beyond themselves. Not too many “baby daddies” in the home school population either. And of course, they can read, write, and spell. Many of the families are debt free. Hmmm. Come to think of it, maybe they ARE freaks. Yes, the NWO Wallstreet Banksters should be VERY afraid.
Truth in Moderation
December 8th, 2012
11:39 am
LOL
“Wall Street”
I must confess, typing URLS all day does take a toll on proper use of the space bar.
Truth in Moderation
December 8th, 2012
11:59 am
@PC
“I’ve taught sentence diagramming”
Good for you. The problem you encountered is that it was taught too late and the students never had a proper foundation in grammar, beginning in 1st-3rd grades. The curriculum we have used teaches sentence diagramming from the beginning. It begins with diagraming a noun and a verb and gradually adds the other parts of speech. This is repeated every grade through 12th. Using this method, students can easily analyze a sentence and check for grammar. Proper usage is taught from the beginning, so bad habits do not have to be unlearned.
RCB
December 8th, 2012
2:13 pm
Diagramming sentences in elementary and middle school improved my reading and spelling skills. By learning word relationships and sentence structure, I was able to transition my early reading skills to more difficult material as I moved along in school. Too bad this is not part of language curriculum anymore. Yes, I was scared when my turn came to diagram a sentence on the blackboard in front of the class, but everybody else was too! But we remembered it.