Stay Wierd (Wildfox edition)

I was about to ask whether Wildfox is an American company, but never mind.

Wildfox is a California company.

Which I'm pretty sure is worse.

I say that because I had kids in New York schools at the same time one of my sisters had kids in California schools.

Merry Christmas!

learning to read by learning to spell in Aruba

from the Official Tourism site of Aruba:

Language

Dutch and the local language of Papiamento are the official languages of Aruba, but most Arubans speak a minimum of four languages including English and Spanish.

In the cab back to the airport we interviewed the driver re: multilingualism in Aruba.

He told us that Aruban children speak Papiamento at home and in Kindergarten.

Then, in 1st grade (I'm pretty sure it was 1st grade, not 2nd -- but I wish to heck I'd taken notes) students move to immersion classes taught in Dutch.

The teacher speaks in Dutch (and does she write her words on the board?? I don't remember).

The children have a slate of her words at their desk, with a piece of tracing paper on top. They trace over the words as she speaks them.

They learn to hear Dutch at the same time they learn to spell Dutch.

That's the way things were done in America lo these many years ago. Both Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn describe learning to read English by learning to spell English.

Aruban children commence studying English and Spanish in 5th grade. Some years back, they moved on to learn Italian, German, Portuguese, and French in high school, but that is no longer the case today.

onward and upward

The poll...asked human resource professionals to identify the greatest “basic skills” and “applied skills” gaps between workers age 31 and younger compared with workers age 50 and older.

• Basic skills – more than half (51 percent) of human resource managers indicated they find older workers to have stronger writing, grammar, and spelling skills in English;
• Applied skills – more than half (52 percent) of human resource managers said older workers exhibit stronger professionalism/work ethic.

SHRM-AARP Poll Shows Organizations are Concerned about Boomer Retirements and Skills Gaps | 4/9/2012

I've been talking to a Manhattan teacher who has a late-afternoon class in the room where I teach. When she learned that I teach freshman composition, she wanted to know whether I was seeing deterioration in students' writing. She expects the next wave of students to have no writing skills at all, and she wondered whether those kids are already showing up in colleges.

The reason she expects the next wave of students to have no writing skills at all is that Manhattan schools are required to use the Lucy Calkins program. The teacher said that everyone in her school hates the curriculum so much they spend every lunch hour venting, and she herself is desperate to find a job in the suburbs because friends have told her suburban schools "let you teach grammar." There's no escaping Calkins in the city. The principal of a neighboring school tried to get rid of the program and was told to reinstate it or find another position. So the program stayed.

In my experience, suburban schools don't teach grammar, either, although I haven't seen the level of micromanaging here that Manhattan teachers are subjected to. If a teacher in my district wants to teach grammar, and knows some grammar, it's not against the rules. But Manhattan teachers are monitored.  Administrators enter their rooms unannounced to inspect the bulletin boards and observe the mini-lessons, and if teachers are found teaching grammar, they're in trouble. Such is educational reform in the big city.

I shared my Geographical Theory of school quality with her: the closer a school's location is physically to Teachers College, the worse it is.

She said, "Well, imagine how bad things are for us."

and see:
Nightmare from Teachers College
Coach Class by Barbara Feinberg

Direct Instruction in Grammar

From the study guide for the California Teachers of English Learners Teacher Certification Exam:

"Direct instruction in grammar and spelling has had disappointing effects on students' writing.  Teachers have not achieved much success with extensive error correction either.  The most successful teaching of language conventions has been the presentation of well-written materials.  A good reader becomes a good writer as the self editing process develops and good models are available.  A teacher is most likely to be successful if he/she keeps a variety of well-written and easily understood examples of both written and spoken English available to the students."

Study guide was prepared by XAMonline.com and has no affiliation with the California Teacher Credentialing Dept. nor the testing companies that California uses.  The above quoted passage doesn't seem that far out of line from what I've seen presented in ed school classes.

chemprof on masked deficits in high-achieving students

chemprof responding to "EVERY PARENT SHOULD PAY ATTENTION TO SPELLING"

Absolutely. I think I've told the story of my first research student before, a very bright biochem major. She got a low C in biochem (after A's in organic) because of exactly this kind of problem. She was an early reader who basically memorized words, but really only read the first 3-4 letters. So she couldn't keep what she called the "glys" straight - glycine, glycolysis, glycogen, etc. all looked the same to her. She really needed explicit phonics, but no one noticed early enough.

That is an amazing story. Amazing, and chilling.

In the early grades, a strong ability to memorize, which C. had and has, is going to mask deficits if the only data anyone cares about is a passing score on the state tests.

C., too, was an early reader with a quick memory; he was one of those kids who 'taught himself to read.' But when he was in fourth grade, I discovered that he could not read a two-syllable nonsense word.

And he couldn't spell at all, which I knew was not right. Everyone in the household thought he'd naturally learn to spell if he just read more, but he had abruptly stopped reading, and his school didn't give many reading assignments.

Interestingly, at some point after C. enrolled in his Jesuit high school, he told me that "The kids are better readers" -- meaning they could read out loud better than kids in his public school. He also heard stories of parents who put their kids in Catholic school "because they couldn't read."

Catholic schools still teach phonics, I believe.

---------------

from the annals of All the answers are belong to us: trying and failing to buy a Direct Instruction spelling book

Chris can spell!

update: Here is Mary Damer on masked deficits & poor spelling in high-performing students.

Some of you who've been reading and writing ktm from the beginning may remember Chris's "psychotic" spelling as a 4th grader.

Well, great news: Chris can spell. I suspect he's still not spelling as well as I probably did at his age, but his spelling is completely 'within the realm,' if you know what I mean, and you probably do.

I've been thinking lately about the issue of how much you can learn about writing (and spelling) just from reading, and I think the answer is that you can learn a great deal ultimately. I say that with the caveat that school reading needs to be guided by a teacher and needs to be systematically increased in difficulty.

Those conditions have been true for Chris, who has taken all Honors and AP courses in high school, and who says he's done all the reading in his classes. The reading load in Honors/AP courses is pretty hefty, the books are quite difficult, and a teacher leads the way.

We worked our way through Megawords Grade 6, which helped tremendously, and Chris's high school reading and writing took him the rest of the way.

His handwriting still stinks, however, although it's better than it was. (Takes me back to our summer adventures with Write Now. Chris's handwriting didn't improve, but mine did.)

the Megawords posts at ktm, the sequel

from the "blooki" index:

• Megawords & sounding out by syllables & spelling research
• The Saxon Math Of Spelling
• Being Your Child's Frontal Lobes
• Great Moments In World History
• Summer Supplement Time
• Summer Supplement Time Part 2
• How To Spell
• How To Spell Part 2
• MoreSpelling
• Liveblogging The Spelling Bee
• teaching spelling through morpheme and book recommendations
• spell check
• bad spelling on job applications

spelling alone

Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee

Spell Czech

Eye halve spelling chequer.  It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marques four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word and weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write.  It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is made, it nose bee fore two long,
And I can put the error rite.  Its rarely ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it, I am shore your pleased two no.
Its letter perfect in its weigh.  My chequer tolled me sew.

~Sauce Unknown


Source:  Hake Grammar & Writing

can you spell 'Oak'?

IPA English vowel chart, oriented towards learners (not documentation)

So this is basically the IPA chart I used with Ali, just that it looks cleaner and there's less scribbling. (Click for larger version).


In my opinion (as in not backed by double blind clinical trials, rigourous empirical evidence or anything but simply my own intuition and experience with others), IPA charts are useful. They provide a "skeleton" in which to arrange the seemingly vast array of English vowel sounds.

I have not really been happy with the way the English vowel system is generally presented to learners, both native children and ESL learners. For one, the vowels are often presented in random lists, and learners aren't told how the vowels are related to each other. An IPA-based vowel chart is organised by two physical traits often used to classify vowels (among others): vowel height, and vowel backness.

Here, height and backness are relative. If you look up the IPA vowel chart on Wikipedia, you find distinctions like "mid-open", "mid-front", etc. but those are w/respect to "absolute" cardinal vowels defined by phoneticians -- and there is no single language that uses all of them. Most languages distinguish 2 or 3 heights, and distinguish 2 or 3 levels of backness. There are always exceptions -- but languages that distinguish 5 heights for example, may only have a handful of consonants, etc. It's a trend you find among the world's languages -- complexities in one area tend to be compensated by simplifications elsewhere.

The more "open" a vowel is, the higher its F1 formant frequency is (more close ==> lower F1 formant frequency). F2 formant frequencies are primarily influenced by vowel backness (more front ==> higher F2 formant frequency). Formant analysis in phonetics goes all the way to formants like F9 ... but their effects are more subtle. And of course formant frequencies have interfering effects on each other, but there are compensating functions to do that -- and I won't discuss any more phonetics because I really want to discuss literacy.

A brief vowel chart orientation (an initiation to IPA). In IPA, /j/ is used preferentially for the "yod" (as in yogurt), since /y/ is used for a vowel sound (that English doesn't use). English has (more or less) eight pure vowels:

æ -- "bad"
ɛ -- "bed"
ɪ -- "bid"
ʊ -- "good"
ɔ -- "law"; for people who make the cot-caught distinction. This pure vowel does not exist by itself in my dialect (New England rhotic)
ɑ -- "father"
ə -- "kernel"
ʌ -- "bud"

Now long vowels. Long vowels aren't actually pure vowels, though they used to be. They are actually diphthongs. A diphthong is a combination of vowel + semivowel (aka vowel-like consonant). Not all combinations of two vowel-like sounds are diphthongs. For example, if you pronounce "towel" with two syllables, there are three-vowel like sounds in there, but there is only one diphthong and there is no "triphthong". My rule of thumb:

1. A diphthong has to occupy the time length of one syllable. The semivowel component is generally shorter and more "clipped" than the vowel, thus the VV sequence is really behaving like VC. The preferred syllable structure in English (if not universally) is the structure CVC, which lasts for the length of one standard syllable. Deviations from this structure generally result in compensation.

For example: the word it. Kinda simple, but you never knew you implemented so many phonological corrections when you used this word! If you use it by itself (just say it to yourself), notice how, the /ɪ/ phoneme is stressed, and is slightly longer than say, the word in "sit". But put a consonant before it -- like in a sentence, and "it" will actually pull a consonant off your preceding syllable, and /ɪ/ will revert back to being an unstressed vowel of normal length. Thus, "make it so" can be analysed as: /mɛ^j.kɪt.sɔ ^w/; all three syllables have the structure CVC. This is part of what we usually regard as "fluency" -- our mind is so automatic and flexible, we unconsciously rearrange phonemes around based on sound laws we don't even think consciously about. These sound rules will also make consonants appear out of thin air:

by themselves: "you" "can" "see" "it" -- /jʊ^w/ | /kɛ~n/ | /sɪ^j/ | /ɪt/ [note stresses in bold]
in a sentence: "You can see it." /jʊ^w.kɛn.sɪ^j.jɪt/ (extra consonant suddenly duplicated from previous syllable: length compensation!) [stresses in bold, extra consonant italicised]

You can observe this as a rule in children. Young children and toddlers have incomplete length compensation -- the result is a sort of sing-song sentence structure we associate with two-year-olds. But analyse the sound structure of a six-year-old or an eight-year-old, and many elaborate sound rules suddenly appear.

Okay, that was a rather long aside. Second rule of thumb:

Diphthongs generally "obscure" their component sounds. Only by conscious analysis do you realise that the sound in "ay" (like stay) is made up of ɛ (like in bed) and the yod (the consonant of yogurt). Same goes for "how" (æ+w). I include rhotics in here too, because they have a tendency to change the vowel, but you can also make an argument for excluding them.

So here are the diphthongs of English:

æ^w -- "how"
æ^j -- "my"
ɛ^j -- "bake"
ɪ^j -- "bee"
ʊ^w -- "moose"
ɔ^w -- "bow"
ɔ^j -- "toy"
ɑ^w -- "sock"
ɑ^r -- "far"
ɑ^wr -- "war", "core" **
ə^r -- "wicker"
ʌ^r -- "kernel", "rehearse" **

** There's further discussion about these diphthongs but it would make this post too long.
There's also nasal vowels (like the vowel in sand) but I've decided to skip that for now.

IMO, this is better than the traditional short-long vowel system often presented, because that system really only allows for ten vowel phonemes and the rest of the vowels are randomly placed. Was always confused about the vowel system from day 1 when it was presented in first grade, until grade 10, which is when I learnt phonetics.

A pure vowel / diphthong contrast can be used to explain English spelling, whereas it's not apparent with a short-long system. So you have to explain why silent-e often generates diphthongs ("long vowels"). OK. Short answer: It's related to length compensation, like the syllable exercises we've been doing above. But why does double-o ("long o") not actually sound like a long "o" (like in stone)? Can you actually make sense of English spelling? Ah, that is for an upcoming post on the Great Vowel Shift.

what do linguists think?

My copy of The Roots of Phonics: A Historical Introduction A Revised Edition by Miriam Balmuth just arrived, and on page 11 I find this:

The question raised is: Can a marking that conveys a general idea be called writing, or must all writing represent specific units of speech?

To this question, the great linguist Leonard Bloomfield apparently gives his answer when he states, "Writing is merely a device for recording speech." This statement narrows writing down to only those markings that are directly related to spoken language. It reflects the attitude of linguistic theoreticians from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

How do linguists define 'writing' today?

Australian spelling test

Anonymous left a link to the Australian Spelling Test, which was normed across 10,000 children in Southern Australia in 2004. I've just given it to C., who turns 15 at the end of the summer:

70 words
59 correct

scoring:
53 correct: above 15.5 yrs

Yaaaaayyy!

Words missed:
familiar
permanent
sufficient
cemetery
definite
apparatus
subterranean
miscellaneous
guarantee
embarrassing
conscientious


more fun with Dick and Jane:

me: "Apparatus."

C.: "a - p - p - e - r - a - t - u - s"

me: "Wrong. It's a - p - p - a - r - a - t - u - s. With an e."

C.: So? It's a verb.


WTM on spelling programs
Schonell spelling test
Megawords posts

Schonell spelling test

In the wake of last night's comeuppance (scroll down to 3rd comment), I decided to give C. the 100-word Schonell spelling test (pdf file) today (here it is without directions - pdf file).^*

C. turns 15 at the end of the summer; his "spelling age" today is 13.5 13.8 years.^**

words missed:
yoke
cushion
familiar
permanent
sufficient
cemetery
subterranean
apparatus
portmanteau (almost got that one - !)
amateur
miscellaneous
committee

Since I have nothing to compare this to (how would most American 14 year-olds fare on this test?) I'm declaring this a 'perfectly acceptable' performance.

'Perfectly acceptable' meaning: I'm thinking by the time C. graduates high school he will easily have reached Spelling Age 15, which is 100% correct.

The good news: all of his misspellings were phonetically correct, if phonetically correct is the term I'm looking for, which I'm not sure it is. e.g.: He spelled "amateur" amature. That kind of thing.

He starts an intensive 3-year French sequence in the fall, so that should help.


Lousia Moats on the English writing system

In addition, the English writing system reveals the history of the English language. For example, ch pronounced as /ch/, as in chair or chief, appears in Anglo-Saxon or Old English words; the same letter combination ch pronounced as /sh/, as in chef and chauffeur, appears in French words of Latin origin; and ch pronounced as /k/, as in ache and orchid, appears in words borrowed from Greek. Approximately 20 percent to 25 percent of English words are of Anglo-Saxon origin and about 60 percent are of Latin origin (of which 50 percent are directly from Latin and another 10 percent are from Latin through French, as in chef and chauffeur). The
remaining 15 to 20 percent of English words are primarily of Greek origin.

How Words Cast Their Spell by Louisa Moats
American Educator - Winter 2008-2009, pp. 6-16 & 42-43

^* posted at the Reading Reform Foundation

^** simple arithmetic eludes me (thank you, Michael Weiss) - and, yes, the formula is weird - not sure quite what's to the right of the decimal point

WTM Forum on spelling programs

They like Megawords (Nick's Mama recommends!), Sequential Spelling,^* All About Spelling (Orton Gillingham approach) and Apples and Pears.


department of oldies but goodies (you may need to hit refresh a couple of times)

On being your child's frontal lobes 5-3-2005
Great Moments in World History 5.14.2005
How to Spell 6-14-2005
How to Spell, part 2: Spelling Inquiry 6-14-2005
Megawords saves a reader? 6-14-2005


Speaking of Megawords, C. is finishing Book 6 this summer.

When he started Book 1, C's spelling was psychotic. That was the word that used to pop into my head whenever I caught sight of his spelling: 'psychotic.'

Today he can spell.

He can also pronounce unfamiliar words phonetically. A couple of days ago a copy of the Barron's guide to colleges arrived, and C. started reading the Most Competitive list out loud. He was getting towards the end of the B's when he said, "bou - doin."

Bowdoin.

Pronouncing Bowdoin "bou-din" when you've never seen the word before probably doesn't sound like much, but the fact is: in 5th grade C. could not pronounce a two- or three-syllable nonsense word phonetically. A single-syllable nonsense word: yes. Two syllables: no.

He was two years above grade level in reading, and suddenly, at the beginning of 5th grade, he stopped reading. We didn't know why and neither did he. He just seemed to lose interest.

Not long after he started the Megawords program, he began reading again and hasn't stopped since. I have to think that wasn't a coincidence.


Phonics Page
Don Potter's Education Page


^* Ken's post on spelling, with comments about various programs including Sequential Spelling

cranberry on the real world

We also don't want them to ask us how to spell for them. "The teacher won't spell for you" is a steadfast rule made clear to students in the beginning of the school year. It liberates the teacher, who has more important responsibilities, and liberates the students, too!

That once meant that the students were to look up the word in the dictionary. Now, everyone's busy with "more important responsibilities."

Just once in such writings, I'd love to see the glimmerings of the concept that perhaps parents are right when they implore schools to teach proper spelling, grammar, and traditional algorithms. Many teachers progress from college straight into the classroom, without a sojourn in the "outside" world. In the world outside the classroom, spelling, grammar, and penmanship count. Courtesy, good manners, perseverance and punctuality count too. The parents who are able to function in the professions, by and large, would prefer that their children leave school with these old-fashioned skills, because these skills are important.


b-ass ackwards
what do authors do?
Four Blocks by Doug Sundseth
Vlorbik on what authors do
cranberry on the real world
Writing Block
Sifting and Sorting Through the 4-Blocks Literacy Model

what do authors do?

Letting children see what adults and good writers do when they need a word they can't spell is important. Authors don't stop their writing and look up a word. They keep writing and spell the word as best they can. Then they hope that spell check will find and fix it. If not, they depend on their editor to be sure everything is correct before going to print!

Writing Block

First of all

First of all, authors can spell.

I once asked Barry Seaman about this. Barry, I said, do editors ever deal with writers who can write but can't spell? He said, basically, No. We happened to be sitting in the audience of a spelling bee at the time, along with Bob Massie, the third member of our team, waiting our turn to compete. Bob said he couldn't spell, but I am here to tell you he's wrong. He can spell.

On the other hand, not one of us could spell flokati. Flokati, come to find out, is not spelled floccati. The correct spelling is flokati. With a k.

Still and all, when 3 authors hear 'floh-kah-tee' and spell it floccati, that is what we call the exception that proves the rule. Authors can spell.

The reason authors can spell is that Learning to Read and Learning to Spell Are One and the Same, Almost. All authors can read; therefore all authors can spell.

True: spelling is harder than reading. But authors are really, really good readers.


And second

Second: supposing an author is steaming along writing stuff down -- lots and lots of stuff, just like they do in Writing Block -- when all of a sudden, out of the blue, she needs to spell the word flokati and she can't remember whether flokati is Greek (with a k) or Italian (with a double-c).

What does she do?

She stops writing and looks up flokati.

The reason she does that is that she is not steaming along writing lots and lots of stuff down. She is sitting in agony eeking ekeing or eking^* out one word, then another word, then possibly another, then hitting back space-delete and starting over again, and that's on a good day, after her 14-year old son has tipped her off to the existence of an Application for Macs that turns off the internet so she can't check her email or read or write a blog about education.

Your choice: write a coherent paragraph about the impulsive-compulsive dimension that other human beings will pay money to read, or look up the word flokati in the dictionary.

I'm taking a poll.

b-ass ackwards
what do authors do?
Four Blocks by Doug Sundseth
Vlorbik on what authors do
cranberry on the real world
Writing Block
Sifting and Sorting Through the 4-Blocks Literacy Model

^* thank you, Jean

b-ass ackwards

advice for teachers from Four Blocks implementer, Cheryl Sigmon:

All at once, I've been besieged by emails concerning spelling in the Writing Block at upper grades. Nancy, a fourth grade teacher in New York, who's enjoying her move to Four-Blocks wrote, "Cheryl, do you think it's important that we misspell words in our model writing daily? It really makes me cringe every time I misspell something, and I'm worried that my students may begin to pick up bad habits from the misspellings I'm modeling. I don't think I can continue to go against my better judgment to spell words correctly! What do you suggest?" Also, Cathy, a curriculum specialist,¹ wrote to ask, "How do you respond to a group of teachers who feel it is of the utmost importance to spell everything correctly when writing in front of the students? These are 4^th and 5^th grade teachers if it makes a difference."

[snip]

First of all, teachers certainly don't want kids to think they can't spell! Our worst nightmare is that Johnny will go home and tell his parents, "My poor teacher can't spell a lick when she writes in front of the class!" Then, of course, the parents are either on our doorstep the next morning or in the principal's office wanting our teaching certificate revoked! In a minute, we're going to be sure that everyone understands why we model misspellings² in front of our students.

[snip]

Next, as far as teachers feeling that they must always spell every word correctly in their model writing, I feel that puts unnecessary stress on the teacher and that it might even be counterproductive to what we've trying to accomplish with students as writers. I would never want to give students at any grade level the impression that perfection is a goal of first draft writing. There are many opportunities in later drafts to edit our work. When producing the first draft, fluency in our writing---getting down our ideas---is the objective. I want to model for my students how to "overlook" possible misspellings by putting down my best guess and circling the word. The circling gives students "permission" to keep writing and provides a marker for returning to correct words they've had to guess.

What we're modeling isn't misspellings. We're actually modeling strategies for how to handle misspellings while we're getting our ideas on paper. Just as we teach students what to do when they come to a word they don't know when they're reading, we also teach students what to do when they come to a word they can't spell in their writing. We want them to be cognizant of the high frequency words they know, the many word patterns, and the meaningful word chunks---all of which will help them make a reasonable guess about the spelling of a word they want to use. We don't want to teach students that they should stop and look up words in the dictionary or the thesaurus during rough draft writing. The rough draft stage of writing is not the appropriate time to do so. That's done in later drafts when editing. We also don't want them to ask us how to spell for them. "The teacher won't spell for you" is a steadfast rule made clear to students in the beginning of the school year. It liberates the teacher, who has more important responsibilities, and liberates the students, too!

Sifting and Sorting through the 4-Blocks Literacy Model by Cheryl M. Sigmon

So we've got grade school kids writing & rewriting multiple "drafts" before they can spell.

Typical.

Here's a question.

Do you think there's a writer on the planet who makes his best guess about how to spell a word, writes that down, circles it, and comes back later to figure it out when he is "working on a further draft?"

Even when he's writing by hand?

I don't.

As to teachers who have "more important responsibilities" than telling students how to spell a word, I guess that explains the 5 years my household has now devoted to Megawords.


b-ass ackwards
what do authors do?
Four Blocks by Doug Sundseth
Vlorbik on what authors do
cranberry on the real world
Writing Block
Sifting and Sorting Through the 4-Blocks Literacy Model

¹ I'm against curriculum specialists
² it's not like we don't have numerous studies demonstrating The Negative Impact of Seeing Misspelled Words or anything

spelling test

25 most commonly misspelled words

via Mankiw, view Newmark's Door

I missed 3.

One of them I absolutely did not know.

Speaking of not knowing, Diane McGuinness has a section in Early Reading Instruction confirming as a universal my impression that a person's spelling deteriorates dramatically when he's exposed to misspellings.^* This is why, she says, teachers should not give multiple choice spelling tests. ^**

Which is exactly the kind of test 25 most commonly misspelled words is. Two of the words I missed because I caught a glimpse of the choices and promptly forgot the correct spelling.

Not so with the third. I was as convinced of the correctness of my chosen spelling as I was of my chosen answer to what is 6 x 7? for God knows how many years. (you may have to hit refresh a couple of times)

^* Seeing misspelled words strongly depressed spelling scores, and the probability of using the same misspelling was high (.76). p. 118

^** Ditto invented spelling.

two thought experiments

1.

Suppose you simplified spelling so that written English became a perfectly transparent writing system like Spanish. It would be obvious to one and all that written English is a code, that spelling means encoding the sounds of the English language, and that reading means decoding the sounds of the English language.

Would schools use phonics to teach children how to read?

2.

Suppose the schools were required to teach all children to read and write Morse code.

Would schools teach children the codes for individual letters and have them practice stringing them together into words and sentences?

Or would schools give students a list of sight words written in Morse to memorize and then have them "read" leveled books written in Morse Code, focusing on the meaning of the text?


update from lgm:

For #2: If it was my district, each child would initially be given his first name in Morse code and expected to memorize it use it to label his color/cut/paste projects. Then it would be sight words. Once the Morse code equivalent of Dolch sight words are mastered, the child would be given instruction in decoding. He would never encode. He would spend far more time listening than watching or doing...which is IMHO why boys get behind. Too much listening to talk about the subject, not enough thinking and practicing on one's own.

hold your horses

Just stumbled across this abstract in an NBER Reporter I downloaded while searching for something else altogether:

Putting Computerized Instruction to the Test: A Randomized Evaluation of a "Scientifically-based" Reading Program

Although schools across the country are investing heavily in computers in the classroom, there is surprisingly little evidence that they actually improve student achievement. In this paper we present results from a randomized study of a well-defined use of computers in schools: a popular instructional computer program, known as Fast ForWord, which is designed to improve language and reading skills. We assess the impact of the program using four different measures of language and reading ability. Our estimates suggest that while use of the computer program may improve some aspects of students' language skills, it does not appear that these gains translate into a broader measure of language acquisition or into actual reading skills.

Working Paper 10315 (pdf file)
NBER Working Paper Series
Cecilia Rouse
Alan B. Krueger
with Lisa Markman

It's not too often you read a peer-reviewed abstract whose tone could be described as droll.

I like droll.

Here's the intro:

According to the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 37 percent of 4th graders in the U.S. read below a basic level and an additional 31 percent read at a basic level, as determined by the National Assessment Governing Board (U.S. Department of Education, 2001). Currie and Thomas (2001) find that scores on a reading test taken at age 7 by participants in the British National Child Development Study are positively correlated with their earnings and likelihood of employment at age 33. Furthermore, adults who score higher on the literacy test in the Adult Literacy Survey have a greater probability of working and higher earnings if they do work (see, e.g., Sum, 1999). While the interpretation of the correlation between literacy and employment outcomes is unclear, it is very likely that improving literacy skills for troubled readers would generate important economic and social benefits.

When we all finally get tired advocating for edu-reform (or edu-revolution, as the case may be), we can take up the cause of simplified spelling.

I certainly intend to.


Mark Twain on simplified spelling
more from Twain
Diane McGuinness on the trouble with English spelling
H.L. Mencken on simplified spelling
Theodore Roosevelt's List of Simplified Spellings
Simplified Spelling Society