Folium: Strange Spelling Puts English-Speaking Learners At a Disadvantage via BigThink
Folium: Strange Spelling Puts English-Speaking Learners at a Disadvantage
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English is hard. Between the pronunciation and the spelling English words are extremely difficult to master to foreign speakers. Native English-speakers intuitively know what order to put words in, but this is hard to teach to those just learning the language. The difference between the right and wrong order is so subtle that it’s hard to explain beyond simply saying that it “just sounds right.” The many who attempt to learn English and spell it correctly often become frustrated with its complexity and give up. Even those who give their best to learn the language and succeed in communicating correctly will forever have trouble with the tricky spelling patterns.
“Many children struggle to meet unrealistic expectations, get discouraged, and never achieve a high literacy level – all at an enormous cost to themselves and to society.” – Robert Montenegro
Robert Montenegro shares with us some really important points about how English speaking students are at a disadvantage when it comes to spelling. “Mastering such a language takes a long time and requires abilities that most children don’t develop until the middle or latter part of elementary school. Many children struggle to meet unrealistic expectations, get discouraged, and never achieve a high literacy level – all at an enormous cost to themselves and to society.” Even for the children who live in an English speaking country, this means a high demand for students to memorize words without having a firm grasp on what that word even means.
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We need a high-drama Spelling-Bee reality show for adults!
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Unlike others my age, when I was nine years old I participated in many spelling bees and won a couple. Besides that point, there are words that I could just never grasp like the words “bough” and “cough” that are spelled nearly identical but don’t sound anything alike. Take hundreds of examples like that and ask 9 year olds to process them and you can see why advanced literacy isn’t feasible for everyone. But we can’t blame teachers necessarily for the difficulties of these words, but we can say that there should be some executive decision made to say that only certain words should be mandatory to learn at a fourth grade level.
“For speakers of other languages, it takes just 2-3 years to learn to read and write what they know how to speak, but it can take on the order of ten years or so to do the same with English.” – Project Unspell
English spelling wasn’t always so convoluted, once it had more of a rhyme and reason to it. Pronunciations have changed and foreign words have been introduced, sometimes retaining the spelling conventions of their original languages. This is the argument that Robert is making in his article. He knows that English has changed thus there should be a change in the way it is taught to young students. Robert worries also for the learners who are dyslexic and need extra help with such words.
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So we can put the blame on the printing presses of the early 19th century, blaming them for changing the words according to the pronunciation. And we can also put the blame on French scholars that decided that the spelling of the words in Latin just didn’t seem right. But do you think we could really change how we teach English to young students? There are many who seem to think so. So if someone is struggling to spell a word, don’t give them a hard time, English is hard!
Julie Martin
LEAF Editor & Contributor
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(ed. English is weird… For example…)
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