Literacy Journal - Week 3

Please post a response to this week's readings. Fox Chapter 3:Based on your experience and your reading of this chapter, do you think "invented spelling" (in which children spell words the way they sound) helps or hinders young readers?What cues do you see your kindergarten buddy using based on his/her writing samples? What other experiences do you have of children using early word identification strategies?

After reading this chapter, and based on my own experiences, I have very mixed feelings about the concept of invented spelling. Obviously, learning how to spell is one of the earliest and most important developments in the literacy of a child. However, for me, the importance of learning how to spell correctly was drilled into me in elementary school. This is why the whole idea of invented spelling seems somewhat odd to me, although I understand that its purpose is to encourage children to write anyway they want, and that the very act of writing becomes more important than correct spelling. Again, the way I was taught, we used workbooks, teacher-generated word lists, and good old-fashioned spelling tests and quizzes.

I know that proponents of invented spelling believe that children should take responsibility for their own spelling, and that the seven best practices listed on pages 79 thru 81 is designed to emphasize becoming good readers with a rich vocabulary, and that by following these steps, students will become better independent spellers (as opposed to teachers administering weekly spelling quizzes and circling in red their misspellings), but part of me remains unconvinced. I suppose the theory is that children will outgrow invented spellings as they read, explore words, etc. But this approach has also been attacked by many educators, who feel that it simply “allows teachers to mask failure to teach spelling effectively” (Dr. Patrick Groff). He also asserts that there is much scientific evidence to show that children learn to spell correctly faster if they are taught in a direct, methodical way, and that there is a direct correlation between children's ability to spell correctly and the quality of their writing. That was, at least, my experience in elementary school.

My other issue with invented spelling has more to do with things that I have observed in my placements, which have been in 5th/6th grades, and 8th/9th grades. In particular, last week, I observed close to 300 students in various stages of writing essays. The students were nearly evenly divided between those that wanted to type their essays on computers, and those that wanted to write them out long-hand. What struck me was the high number of misspellings that were occurring on the computer essays, that is, at least, until they were ready to print and let the computer do an automatic spell-check. Of course, this has always been one of the main issues with students using computers at increasingly younger ages: it makes them into thoughtless and often lazy writers (and by extension, readers). And as I witnessed first-hand, a spell-check only goes so far, because if a student uses their instead of there, it is not detected as a misspelling. Even worse is when the student is presented with multiple options for his or her misspelling. One student (an eighth grader I believe) raised his hand and asked for my help, because he was trying to type the word “coincidence,” but had spelled it so completely wrong (something like “cawinsedens”) that the spell check program couldn’t even offer any suggestions. I also noticed that students who had problems spelling usually had similar weaknesses with grammar, sentence structure and coherency in their writing. Of course there were exceptions, and some of the students had multiple misspellings because they were typing quickly (although the knowledge that the computer would spell-check didn’t hurt either).

One theory I have read proposes that perhaps invented spelling has usefulness, but only through kindergarten, and that starting in first grade, it will have outlived its usefulness. Of course one can argue that with the proliferation of computers, perhaps spelling doesn’t even really matter that much anymore. According to the Internet, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and John Lennon were all poor spellers, but I’m not sure that is a good or correct lesson to convey. Yes, you can be a good, highly creative writer, without being a particularly good speller. But I think part of comprehensive literacy is the ability to spell correctly and proofread your own work. Speaking only from my own experience, I think that the ability to spell correctly only strengthened my ability to read and write cogently.

On the other hand, one thing that the book and Chapter 3 emphasizes is that no two children learn in exactly the same way, and that a teacher must be flexible and adaptive to each student’s individual needs. So while it is possible that certain students in second, third, maybe even fourth grade could still benefit from “inventive” spelling, it would be equally important that it not be used on many students past kindergarten, having hopefully outgrown its effectiveness or usefulness.