37 ms·

>The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loo

>The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment. I'm not sure I agree with this. This doesn't teach the fundamentals and rules of how words are put together. Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words, it's learning the rules of English and how words are actually put together so, even if you don't know how a word's spelled, you should be able to at least be able to make a good guess based on your knowledge of English. The spell checker doesn't teach you any of this.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jacobolus 7y ago
People don’t learn the “rules of English” through explicit instruction. They learn them through years (decades) of exposure. Anecdotally, the main predictor of how good someone’s spelling will be is how much reading they have done.
- filoleg 7y ago
  >Anecdotally, the main predictor of how good someone’s spelling will be is how much reading they have done. Agreed, but it doesn't just have to be books. My personal example: in my native language, I read tons of books as a child, which was what gave me a strong edge when it comes to spelling/grammar. I got into learning english in my late teens, and, by that time, I wasn't as much into reading long-form books as I was into reading random things on the internet. I would say my grammar/spelling is on about the same level in english as it is in my native language, at the moment. In both cases, however, I can easily attribute it to consuming a lot of reading material that gave me some kind of intuition for the correct spelling/grammar. I don't remember explicit grammar rules for either language. In case of my native one, I never really learned the rules in the first place, as I had trouble memorizing those, and the rules felt forced and arbitrary with tons of exceptions to each of them. I just know that something feels "right" or "wrong", simply because of tons of reading that settled down in my head.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Yeah, and I prefer the (good, "adult") Russian translation of the Lord of the Rings to the original too! :P
    - filoleg 7y ago
      Wait, there was something special about the Russian translation of LotR? I totally missed it then, because that's how I read LotR as a kid (translated Russian version), and I have never re-visited the book since then, as I was not a big fan of the movies (which, I know, is almost a sacrilegious thing to admit, given the reactions I've received for saying it irl).
      - BlueTemplar 7y ago
        Haha, I knew it ! Let me guess, you read the "big single dark brown book" version too ? It might be just the children nostalgia though... (Had the same reaction to the movies initially !) I've also seen much later a translation that seemed to be designed "for kids" and that seemed godawful to me !
        filoleg 7y ago
        Unfortunately, I think I might have read the newer translation. I don't have it anymore, but iirc I got the book around 2005-2006, and it might have been brown underneath, but it had that glossy art cover over it that I took off only once to check out how it looked without it.
        BlueTemplar 7y ago
        Hah, completely forgot about that, it got lost pretty quickly...
- shard 7y ago
  In related news, the younger generation of kids in Asian countries are getting worse and worse at writing Chinese characters because they can just type the Romanized versions without learning how to write it. Personally I am able to read Chinese at a moderately high level (can read newspapers) but I cannot write most characters off the top of my head. This is what happens when you emphasize reading over physical writing with pen and paper.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Is that a bad thing? You can still write in Chinese with an IME, and most uses are on some sort of phone or computer anyways. 27 year old me learned how to text in Chinese but skipped learning the muscle memory to write characters, first I'm left handed so stroke order was bizarrely awkward anyways, but also...it just didn't feel important anymore.
    - kochikame 7y ago
      If you live in a Chinese-speaking country then, yes, it's a bad thing. There are plenty of situations in which you still have to write; at the post office, applying for things, hospitals, places like that. Maybe not every day, I'll grant you that, but you are going to hit barriers when required to write your address or apply for a driving license or similar. You don't want to be the guy painstakingly copying characters stroke by stroke off his phone while a line grows behind you. I live in Japan and often regret that my writing is so far behind my reading comprehension. Like, it doesn't need to be AS good, but it would be better if it were close.
      - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        I lived in Beijing for 9 years and it didn't seem to be a problem. Yes, I occasionally had to really write something in Chinese (e.g. at the bank when making an account changed), but my hand was basically held while writing it. The post office and hospital never required me to write in Chinese.
        7y ago
- grawprog 7y ago
  I did. They taught us this in school. My spelling is good. I rarely rely on a spell checker and have autocorrect turned off on my keyboard because I find it annoying rather than helpful. Knowing how to spell and sound out words helped me be a better reader and kept reading interesting for me. Anecdotally, I've met many people that dislike reading because they find large words complicated to comprehend, their spelling is usually atrocious also. I also know a few heavy readers with terrible spelling because they never learned properly. Their pronunciation of large words is usually atrocious.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    > I've met many people that dislike reading because they find large words complicated to comprehend, their spelling is usually atrocious also. I also know a few heavy readers with terrible spelling because they never learned properly. Their pronunciation of large words is usually atrocious. None of the people I know who grew up in highly literate families with parents who read with them several hours per week up through age 7+ ever had either of these problems in adulthood. Including the dyslexic ones. I am highly skeptical that your acquaintances dislike reading because the spelling of long words is too complicated. More realistically they find long words hard because they never did enough reading to become fluent. Nearly everyone can get at least 90% of the way to reading arbitrary English text with about a year of appropriate reading instruction at age 6 plus a few years of regular practice. As someone who never spent any effort on spelling in school, big words are fine to read and spelling is no trouble. I also dislike and disable autocorrect. I’d happily put my pronunciation of arbitrary English words up against anyone who isn’t a professional linguist.
  - vonseel 7y ago
    Heavy readers with terrible spelling seems odd... spelling isn't something that is hard, it's kind of automatic once you use a language past a certain age, at least for me.
- pyuser583 7y ago
  In other words, exposure to professional, high quality writing that rigorously follows the rules of English. Unlike most speakers.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago
  I'd say that nothing is learned through instructions. There always is an element of use that turns instructions into understanding.
dnqthao 7y ago
Like English spelling has any rules. There are a lot of irregularities with English spelling that students need to learn by heart how the word is spelled compared to how it is pronounced.
- grawprog 7y ago
  English spelling has plenty of rules. It's just inconsistent and full of exceptions because English has its roots in many different languages and unfortunately inherits rules from all of them as well as having a bunch of its own.
- mrr54 7y ago
  English spelling absolutely has rules. The famous 'ghoti' example (where supposedly it should be able to be pronounced 'fish' because of 'gh' in rough, 'ti' in 'nation', etc.) is nonsense because there's only one way that word can be pronounced in English and that's 'goatee'. Irregularities don't mean it doesn't have rules. The most common 1-2k words are much less regular than the rest of the language, but learning how they're spelt is not remotely difficult for children (no adult that doesn't have a learning disability struggles to remember how to spell 'much' or 'about'). The rest of the language is pretty much regular.
  - shaded-enmity 7y ago
    Obligatory "What if English were phonetically consistent": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU
  - shard 7y ago
    Funny, I always pronounced "ghoti" like "Gotti".
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Slight difference in vowel, otherwise the same, that's valid enough. English isn't great at telling you the exact vowel, probably because people keep making them shift.
saulrh 7y ago
> Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words Funny you should say that in defense of classical methods of teaching literacy, which for me consisted of eight years of memorizing lists of words and regurgitating them on weekly spelling quizzes. Weekly spelling quizzes. Memorized lists of ten to fifteen words at a time. All the way into high school.
- remarkEon 7y ago
  I had the same methods. Ironically I’ve learned more about the English language in attempting to learn (or re-learn) other languages (Spanish, German, French, Latin). So idk, I inclined to buy the argument that teaching the parts of all the systems is a better start than teaching one system at a time, and doing it through brute force memorization.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Those lists aren't picked at random. They're designed to expose learners to words with letter groups, structures, silent letters, etc they might not encounter otherwise. You learned about spelling by seeing them.
- benhurmarcel 7y ago
  During primary school I switched to a place that did a weekly dictation. So like every Monday, first thing in the morning was a half-hour of the professor reading a page of text and you handed off your copy of it, you lose one point per mistake basically (out of 20 points, the standard in France). That helped tremendously with my spelling.
- MandieD 7y ago
  Ours were thematically grouped, usually by phoneme. For example, I remember that one week in elementary was /hw/ ("what","when","whichever"). I never had to study for spelling, probably because reading was my favorite thing to do. Well, until I had one teacher who tested that we'd memorized the list of words... Explicitly studying spelling ended after 5th grade (rural elementary school in Texas, late 80s/early 90s) Spellcheck is a wonderful tool, but relying on it can lead to embarrassing results. I would not want the kids in my life using it until they have their own grasp of spelling.
xmprt 7y ago
That's what the reading is for
knolax 7y ago
> Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words, it's learning the rules of English and how words are actually put together Learning those rules involve learning the orthographies of French, Latin, and Greek, etc. as well as their associated transliteration schemes(usually multiple per language), and memorizing which one was used for which specific word(Hamburg[0] vs. burgher[1] vs. bourgeoisie[2] vs. Berger[3]), as well as words where the etymology was erroneous (ex. scissor[4]). I don't think most people actually learn this. [0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie [1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/burgher https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/burgher [2] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berger https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berger [4] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor Edit: See comment below for better source.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > words where the etymology was erroneous (ex. scissor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor) Seems the better link is https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissors https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissors Apparently “chisel” comes from the same source.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jacobolus 7y ago

People don’t learn the “rules of English” through explicit instruction. They learn them through years (decades) of exposure. Anecdotally, the main predictor of how good someone’s spelling will be is how much reading they have done.

filoleg 7y ago
>Anecdotally, the main predictor of how good someone’s spelling will be is how much reading they have done. Agreed, but it doesn't just have to be books. My personal example: in my native language, I read tons of books as a child, which was what gave me a strong edge when it comes to spelling/grammar. I got into learning english in my late teens, and, by that time, I wasn't as much into reading long-form books as I was into reading random things on the internet. I would say my grammar/spelling is on about the same level in english as it is in my native language, at the moment. In both cases, however, I can easily attribute it to consuming a lot of reading material that gave me some kind of intuition for the correct spelling/grammar. I don't remember explicit grammar rules for either language. In case of my native one, I never really learned the rules in the first place, as I had trouble memorizing those, and the rules felt forced and arbitrary with tons of exceptions to each of them. I just know that something feels "right" or "wrong", simply because of tons of reading that settled down in my head.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Yeah, and I prefer the (good, "adult") Russian translation of the Lord of the Rings to the original too! :P
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Wait, there was something special about the Russian translation of LotR? I totally missed it then, because that's how I read LotR as a kid (translated Russian version), and I have never re-visited the book since then, as I was not a big fan of the movies (which, I know, is almost a sacrilegious thing to admit, given the reactions I've received for saying it irl).
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Haha, I knew it ! Let me guess, you read the "big single dark brown book" version too ? It might be just the children nostalgia though... (Had the same reaction to the movies initially !) I've also seen much later a translation that seemed to be designed "for kids" and that seemed godawful to me !
      - filoleg 7y ago
        Unfortunately, I think I might have read the newer translation. I don't have it anymore, but iirc I got the book around 2005-2006, and it might have been brown underneath, but it had that glossy art cover over it that I took off only once to check out how it looked without it.
        BlueTemplar 7y ago
        Hah, completely forgot about that, it got lost pretty quickly...
shard 7y ago
In related news, the younger generation of kids in Asian countries are getting worse and worse at writing Chinese characters because they can just type the Romanized versions without learning how to write it. Personally I am able to read Chinese at a moderately high level (can read newspapers) but I cannot write most characters off the top of my head. This is what happens when you emphasize reading over physical writing with pen and paper.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Is that a bad thing? You can still write in Chinese with an IME, and most uses are on some sort of phone or computer anyways. 27 year old me learned how to text in Chinese but skipped learning the muscle memory to write characters, first I'm left handed so stroke order was bizarrely awkward anyways, but also...it just didn't feel important anymore.
  - kochikame 7y ago
    If you live in a Chinese-speaking country then, yes, it's a bad thing. There are plenty of situations in which you still have to write; at the post office, applying for things, hospitals, places like that. Maybe not every day, I'll grant you that, but you are going to hit barriers when required to write your address or apply for a driving license or similar. You don't want to be the guy painstakingly copying characters stroke by stroke off his phone while a line grows behind you. I live in Japan and often regret that my writing is so far behind my reading comprehension. Like, it doesn't need to be AS good, but it would be better if it were close.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      I lived in Beijing for 9 years and it didn't seem to be a problem. Yes, I occasionally had to really write something in Chinese (e.g. at the bank when making an account changed), but my hand was basically held while writing it. The post office and hospital never required me to write in Chinese.
      - 7y ago
grawprog 7y ago
I did. They taught us this in school. My spelling is good. I rarely rely on a spell checker and have autocorrect turned off on my keyboard because I find it annoying rather than helpful. Knowing how to spell and sound out words helped me be a better reader and kept reading interesting for me. Anecdotally, I've met many people that dislike reading because they find large words complicated to comprehend, their spelling is usually atrocious also. I also know a few heavy readers with terrible spelling because they never learned properly. Their pronunciation of large words is usually atrocious.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > I've met many people that dislike reading because they find large words complicated to comprehend, their spelling is usually atrocious also. I also know a few heavy readers with terrible spelling because they never learned properly. Their pronunciation of large words is usually atrocious. None of the people I know who grew up in highly literate families with parents who read with them several hours per week up through age 7+ ever had either of these problems in adulthood. Including the dyslexic ones. I am highly skeptical that your acquaintances dislike reading because the spelling of long words is too complicated. More realistically they find long words hard because they never did enough reading to become fluent. Nearly everyone can get at least 90% of the way to reading arbitrary English text with about a year of appropriate reading instruction at age 6 plus a few years of regular practice. As someone who never spent any effort on spelling in school, big words are fine to read and spelling is no trouble. I also dislike and disable autocorrect. I’d happily put my pronunciation of arbitrary English words up against anyone who isn’t a professional linguist.
- vonseel 7y ago
  Heavy readers with terrible spelling seems odd... spelling isn't something that is hard, it's kind of automatic once you use a language past a certain age, at least for me.
pyuser583 7y ago
In other words, exposure to professional, high quality writing that rigorously follows the rules of English. Unlike most speakers.
Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago
I'd say that nothing is learned through instructions. There always is an element of use that turns instructions into understanding.

dnqthao 7y ago

Like English spelling has any rules. There are a lot of irregularities with English spelling that students need to learn by heart how the word is spelled compared to how it is pronounced.

grawprog 7y ago
English spelling has plenty of rules. It's just inconsistent and full of exceptions because English has its roots in many different languages and unfortunately inherits rules from all of them as well as having a bunch of its own.
mrr54 7y ago
English spelling absolutely has rules. The famous 'ghoti' example (where supposedly it should be able to be pronounced 'fish' because of 'gh' in rough, 'ti' in 'nation', etc.) is nonsense because there's only one way that word can be pronounced in English and that's 'goatee'. Irregularities don't mean it doesn't have rules. The most common 1-2k words are much less regular than the rest of the language, but learning how they're spelt is not remotely difficult for children (no adult that doesn't have a learning disability struggles to remember how to spell 'much' or 'about'). The rest of the language is pretty much regular.
- shaded-enmity 7y ago
  Obligatory "What if English were phonetically consistent": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU
- shard 7y ago
  Funny, I always pronounced "ghoti" like "Gotti".
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Slight difference in vowel, otherwise the same, that's valid enough. English isn't great at telling you the exact vowel, probably because people keep making them shift.

saulrh 7y ago

> Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words Funny you should say that in defense of classical methods of teaching literacy, which for me consisted of eight years of memorizing lists of words and regurgitating them on weekly spelling quizzes. Weekly spelling quizzes. Memorized lists of ten to fifteen words at a time. All the way into high school.

remarkEon 7y ago
I had the same methods. Ironically I’ve learned more about the English language in attempting to learn (or re-learn) other languages (Spanish, German, French, Latin). So idk, I inclined to buy the argument that teaching the parts of all the systems is a better start than teaching one system at a time, and doing it through brute force memorization.
onion2k 7y ago
Those lists aren't picked at random. They're designed to expose learners to words with letter groups, structures, silent letters, etc they might not encounter otherwise. You learned about spelling by seeing them.
benhurmarcel 7y ago
During primary school I switched to a place that did a weekly dictation. So like every Monday, first thing in the morning was a half-hour of the professor reading a page of text and you handed off your copy of it, you lose one point per mistake basically (out of 20 points, the standard in France). That helped tremendously with my spelling.
MandieD 7y ago
Ours were thematically grouped, usually by phoneme. For example, I remember that one week in elementary was /hw/ ("what","when","whichever"). I never had to study for spelling, probably because reading was my favorite thing to do. Well, until I had one teacher who tested that we'd memorized the list of words... Explicitly studying spelling ended after 5th grade (rural elementary school in Texas, late 80s/early 90s) Spellcheck is a wonderful tool, but relying on it can lead to embarrassing results. I would not want the kids in my life using it until they have their own grasp of spelling.

xmprt 7y ago

That's what the reading is for

knolax 7y ago

> Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words, it's learning the rules of English and how words are actually put together Learning those rules involve learning the orthographies of French, Latin, and Greek, etc. as well as their associated transliteration schemes(usually multiple per language), and memorizing which one was used for which specific word(Hamburg[0] vs. burgher[1] vs. bourgeoisie[2] vs. Berger[3]), as well as words where the etymology was erroneous (ex. scissor[4]). I don't think most people actually learn this. [0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie [1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/burgher https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/burgher [2] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berger https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berger [4] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor Edit: See comment below for better source.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jacobolus 7y ago
> words where the etymology was erroneous (ex. scissor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor) Seems the better link is https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissors https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissors Apparently “chisel” comes from the same source.