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THE CHALKBOARD

Spelling making a comeback in school

By Laura Pappano, 1/25/2004

We New Englanders are so primed for competition, we risk withdrawal given a Sunday without a Pats game and a week gap between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

One idea: Make nachos, invite friends over, and watch "Spellbound," an award-winning film released last week on DVD about the high-stakes face-off between children taking part in the National Spelling Bee. Seeing 13-year-olds with braces parse words like "chiaroscurist" and "demarche" is apparently as thrilling as a Rodney Harrison interception in the end zone. Well, almost.

The point is something is happening around spelling.

ESPN president George Bodenheimer may not have earned his top ranking in the Sporting News "Power 100" for broadcasting the National Spelling Bee finals. But people are tuning in. After decades in which teachers fretted about crimping creative expression, interest in spelling is rising.

Newer research by national literacy specialists suggests that, for the most part, good spellers aren't born; they're made. And improving spelling ability is connected to improving language skills in other areas. While researchers say most of us can become better spellers with practice, some appear more "natural" as a result of being motivated readers, having a deeper understanding of language, or better vocabularies.

This is not to suggest spelling is eviscerating content in writing, only that spelling does matter. The Lincoln-Eliot School in Newton has "must know" words no one may misspell. And middle and high school teachers are clamping down on misspelled words. In addition, the essay on the English MCAS, worth 20 points, awards eight of them for spelling and grammar.

"My sense is we are in a transition," said Richard Venezky, professor of educational studies at the University of Delaware and a national specialist on spelling and spelling history.

Between the 1960s and '80s spelling was deemphasized in schools, said Venezky. He sees a reviving interest in it, though a lingering ambivalence. "Teachers aren't comfortable not teaching spelling," he said. "On the other hand, they feel if they spend a lot of time on it, they will be accused of making frivolous use of time in the classroom."

That notion that spelling may be a waste of time fits with the popular social belief that some people are natural spellers and some are not. That perception has for years kept middle and high school teachers from talking too much about spelling, assuming students got enough of the basics in elementary school.

Add to the mix the introduction of computers and spell-checking, which has its limitations. At Wayland High School, English teacher Janet Karman said, "Some teachers feel it is more important to get the creative ideas out and not feel so constrained about the rules of grammar, the rules of spelling."

Yet, her department expects final drafts of papers to be checked for spelling. More than three errors, she said, means a drop of two-thirds of a grade, such as from a B to a C-plus. A student has three days to correct the paper, raising the grade one-third, to a B-minus. "I try to walk that line, not wanting kids to be constrained, but knowing you lose credibility if you can't spell, you can't speak well, you can't write well," said Karman.

John King, codirector of Roxbury Preparatory Charter School with grades 6 to 8, said spelling matters for his students because -- like it or not -- "people make judgments, especially about our kids who are urban students of color."

Urban minority students who misspell or misuse words may be labeled as poorly educated or unintelligent, King said. That's why his students have two English classes a day: one reading class and one on English and grammar, where they also learn the Greek and Latin roots of words.

Such emphasis on the mechanics of language is making some students aware of spelling weaknesses. Eighth-grader Rheeyan Johnson, 13, knows he "usually spells words wrong that have silent letters at the end."

Often, Roxbury Prep reading teacher Dinah Shepherd finds poor spelling is related to a poor foundation in phonics and a limited vocabulary. "The words kids can't read are the words kids can't spell," said Shepherd.

Richard Hodges, professor emeritus at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, who is working on a book about spelling in America, has studied spelling bee participants. He said the best ones employ many tools, including understanding a word's roots, its origin, its part of speech, and how it relates to similar words. As a last resort, he said, top spellers rely on the way a word sounds. "Good spellers really know how words are structured," said Hodges.

Rebecca Bowers Sipe, author of "They Still Can't Spell?: Understanding and Supporting Challenged Spellers in Middle and High School," blames the way spelling is taught in early grades as the reason some kids struggle with it. "Many students walk away from their K-6 instruction with the notion that every single word in the language needs to be learned separately," she said.

While most kids do pick up spelling basics from traditional weekly lists of words, Sipe said, as many as 30 percent of students do not learn to spell using these methods.

Traditional spelling instruction also moves too quickly and doesn't fully teach spelling rules that let students draw connections between words, Sipe said. Rules like " `I' before `e,' except after `c,' " work about 70 percent of the time and has specific exceptions that are worth studying, she said.

The bottom line: Spelling takes time and effort. "The biggest factor in learning to spell is practice," Venezky said.

Newton South High School English teacher Robert Jampol, moderator of an annual spelling bee at the school, said some students "got a different message over the years" and give little value to proper spelling, feeling "that the idea mattered more and the packaging least."

That doesn't mean teachers aren't getting out their red pens and letting students know that spelling does count, said Jampol, who stopped using a spelling text 19 years ago because it didn't improve student spelling.

Jampol, of course, does not tell students about Abraham Lincoln, who spelled the same word differently within the same document. "Lincoln's spelling was very uneven," Jampol said.

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