Proposals to teach children to spell words wrongly
Discussion
Blib said:
GetCarter said:
They said that the D in Wednesday is silent. Only if you don't pronounce the bloody word correctly! Wensday indeed. We'll have Janry & Febry next.
Wenzdee.
My wife was a speech therapist for 30 years... I give you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coarticulation
..and what many of you do here which is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision
Like any evolving language - the easy route usually wins. Hence > Wensday
Typoglycemia.
"I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the phaonmneel pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rseearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Scuh a cdonition is arppoiatrely cllaed Typoglycemia .
"Amzanig huh? Yaeh and you awlyas thguoht slpeling was ipmorantt."
"I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the phaonmneel pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rseearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Scuh a cdonition is arppoiatrely cllaed Typoglycemia .
"Amzanig huh? Yaeh and you awlyas thguoht slpeling was ipmorantt."
CoolC said:
Jasandjules said:
It would be helpful if some teachers could also spell correctly.
I think you've identified the driver behind this.Teachers and parents who grew up during the "prizes for all" Blair years, that never learned to read & write correctly themselves.
Hasn't spelling changed over the years ? Look at some English written 200 yrs ago, as as sure as eggs are eggs, there will be different spelling of words still in use today. Anyway, doesn't bother me, as as a soon as I've typed out a document, I hit the spel cheka. Oh, hang on, there's a problem. That has wrong spellins as well. Dam !!!!
HD Adam said:
CoolC said:
Jasandjules said:
It would be helpful if some teachers could also spell correctly.
I think you've identified the driver behind this.Teachers and parents who grew up during the "prizes for all" Blair years, that never learned to read & write correctly themselves.
torqueofthedevil said:
probably a large part of falling standards will be due to children reading less
Interestingly my youngest; now 15 and doing her GCSE finals in a few months time, has never read, hates reading and finds it boring, however she excels in English language and literature and is predicted an A* in both.No one can work out; least of all her teachers, how she is so good at it due to the fact that she doesn't read and never has done.
During her mocks last week, I asked one day; "what exam do you have tomorrow?", "English" was her reply, "have you revised?" was my response, "I don't need to" was her reply and in truth she doesn't.
Plainly this isn't going to work. Even for languages which are much less widely spoken (French! 
) the presence of a national language academy does little to guide the evolution of the language.
English is even more untameable - people speak it and teach it in every country in the world, huge amounts of literature exist, and it's the most used language on the internet. It's almost Darwinian, and that's why English is so popular. Noah Webster attempted something similar to this with his dictionary in the USA, and while at the time he was mainly seeking to regularise spelling to a more logical system he did introduce a number of simplifications, a lot of which failed.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/spelling-refor...
Webster's changed worked to a limited extent due to the relative paucity of written material at the time. These days children are exposed to a lot of written English, mainly on the internet, and that is not going to use the variant spellings that they might be taught in schools.
So for a lot of children it will cause confusion, some of them will ignore what they're taught in schools and write "properly", and for a few poor kids who don't see a lot of writing outside of school they would end up thinking that this was the right way to spell. I'd give it a couple of years.
) the presence of a national language academy does little to guide the evolution of the language. English is even more untameable - people speak it and teach it in every country in the world, huge amounts of literature exist, and it's the most used language on the internet. It's almost Darwinian, and that's why English is so popular. Noah Webster attempted something similar to this with his dictionary in the USA, and while at the time he was mainly seeking to regularise spelling to a more logical system he did introduce a number of simplifications, a lot of which failed.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/spelling-refor...
Webster's changed worked to a limited extent due to the relative paucity of written material at the time. These days children are exposed to a lot of written English, mainly on the internet, and that is not going to use the variant spellings that they might be taught in schools.
So for a lot of children it will cause confusion, some of them will ignore what they're taught in schools and write "properly", and for a few poor kids who don't see a lot of writing outside of school they would end up thinking that this was the right way to spell. I'd give it a couple of years.
Blib said:
Typoglycemia.
"I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the phaonmneel pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rseearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Scuh a cdonition is arppoiatrely cllaed Typoglycemia .
"Amzanig huh? Yaeh and you awlyas thguoht slpeling was ipmorantt."
But that only works if you know the original, correct, spelling of the word, surely? If you haven't trained your brain to know the root, its just so much text on a page."I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the phaonmneel pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rseearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Scuh a cdonition is arppoiatrely cllaed Typoglycemia .
"Amzanig huh? Yaeh and you awlyas thguoht slpeling was ipmorantt."
greygoose said:
HTP99 said:
My wife is an assistant manager for a nursery, her spelling is fine, however her puntuation is awful, I usually go through the newsletters correcting it.
You should have asked her how to spell punctuation.My wife is an assistant manager for a nursery; her spelling is fine, however her punctuation is awful. I usually go through the newsletters correcting it.
Semi-colons FTW.
Hoofy said:
Jasandjules said:
It would be helpful if some teachers could also spell correctly.
If you ever get a letter back from school with typos, go over it with a red biro and return it with a mark out of 10. O/T now but the whole systems seems so pink and fluffy these days, with words of punishments being changed to sound less....punishing? When I were a lad (pull up a sandbag) the really bad people went to a room where they would sit on their own, this was called "Isolation", except these days its called "Inclusion". (What the kids are being included in here I don't know, they still sit there on their own) Detentions are still detentions amazingly, but naughty behavior will now have kids facing "Sanctions", or various mini-punishments, clearly inspired by the United Nations.
As for the spelling side of things though, language is an ever evolving thing, with words coming and going all the time. I suppose its a slightly different matter to the spelling which never seems to change, but perhaps we're due to modernise this aspect? What purpose to silent letters serve in a word? A lot of them I think are hangovers to the word's original meaning or inception which will have been a long, long time ago. You only have to look at the way words were spelled a few hundred years ago to see they have changed at some point to reflect how they look now.
davepoth said:
greygoose said:
HTP99 said:
My wife is an assistant manager for a nursery, her spelling is fine, however her puntuation is awful, I usually go through the newsletters correcting it.
You should have asked her how to spell punctuation.My wife is an assistant manager for a nursery; her spelling is fine, however her punctuation is awful. I usually go through the newsletters correcting it.
Semi-colons FTW.
Can't we try and get the Americans to learn how to spell correctly first?
Maybe our teaching needs to be improved if our children are a little behind the rest of Europe, rather than dumb it down to make it easier to pass. This seems like a labour thing to do, rather than address the problem and come up with a long term difficult but necessary solution, these cretins just want everyone to be equal at the bottom.
In Japan it takes children approximately 7 years to learn how to read everything that can be printed in a newspaper (2100 kanji + the hiragana and katakana writing system which they limit themselves too). Much more than other countries, but that's just because there is much more to learn compared to our 26 characters. So we shouldn't always be trying to compete directly when things aren't always equal to start with.
Maybe our teaching needs to be improved if our children are a little behind the rest of Europe, rather than dumb it down to make it easier to pass. This seems like a labour thing to do, rather than address the problem and come up with a long term difficult but necessary solution, these cretins just want everyone to be equal at the bottom.
In Japan it takes children approximately 7 years to learn how to read everything that can be printed in a newspaper (2100 kanji + the hiragana and katakana writing system which they limit themselves too). Much more than other countries, but that's just because there is much more to learn compared to our 26 characters. So we shouldn't always be trying to compete directly when things aren't always equal to start with.
Edited by Xaero on Saturday 24th January 17:18
Pints said:
davepoth said:
greygoose said:
HTP99 said:
My wife is an assistant manager for a nursery, her spelling is fine, however her puntuation is awful, I usually go through the newsletters correcting it.
You should have asked her how to spell punctuation.My wife is an assistant manager for a nursery; her spelling is fine, however her punctuation is awful. I usually go through the newsletters correcting it.
Semi-colons FTW.
Her punctuation is far worse, believe me.
Dodsy said:
2 sMoKiN bArReLs said:
To be fair children are exposed to a lot more American spelling than say 15 years ago. (With iPhones, computer etc)..it's no wonder they find it more difficult.
Schools have been using source material from the internet for years. I send any homework with american spellings back with a letter explaining why i have told them not to do the work. It happens regularly. Lazy teachers.HD Adam said:
CoolC said:
Jasandjules said:
It would be helpful if some teachers could also spell correctly.
I think you've identified the driver behind this.Teachers and parents who grew up during the "prizes for all" Blair years, that never learned to read & write correctly themselves.
Also, my most inspirational lecturer at University has terribly bad spelling and he certainly wasn't raised in the 'Blair prizes for all' era, but rather the 'Thatcher prizes for no-one' era. It didn't stop him being brilliant at his job though.
The driver behind it is the parents who do not raise their children correctly.
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