Spelling bees - how do you spell...?

The spelling bee is a very North American concept. These spelling competitions have never really become popular in the UK, but in 2005 the BBC did run a series called Hard Spell. Children competed against each other to find the best speller - it went on for weeks and drew good audiences I think. But it seems once was enough for the British public.

The Times newspaper has an online spelling bee - compete against yourself or others. I'll give you the link but it comes with a warning: if you are quite a good speller - it's very addictive, if you are not a good speller - it's depressing. If you're really sure you've got time / self-esteem to spare: http://www.timesspellingbee.co.uk/Default.aspx .

While I was playing with the Times spelling bee game (I told you it was addictive) I was trying to work out HOW I knew the spellings that I knew.

Sound
It was partly by sound, but certainly not exclusively. And sometimes I had to distort the real sound (like saying com-fort-able instead of comf-table to spell comfortable), not something we want to encourage in second language learners.

Sight
It was also partly visual - I could usually see the word in my head, at least the rough shape of it. If I took time to glance at the word on the screen, I could tell immediately if it was wrong, even if I didn't know the right spelling.

Patterns
Sometimes I just followed orthographic patterns. I knew to write the suffix 'able' not 'abel', and of course I knew that I needed a 'u' after 'q' in acquaint. I knew that acknowledgement had to keep the 'e' before the suffix to keep the 'g' soft (in British English).

Morphology
Other morphological rules really helped, as they are generally very regular. I knew prefixes had to be added to whole words and when I needed to double a letter before a suffix. I also had a bank of prefixes and suffixes in my head that I could select from. Sub and terra were useful for subterranean. Such chunks have become fairly automatic - I don't have to think about them letter-by-letter.

Lexical spelling
Sometimes I had to relate a word to another semantically linked word: for zealot I had to refer to zeal, I got the 'c' in vivacious because I thought of vivacity.

Etymology
Some understanding of etymology can help too. Although the English word facile isn't one I write often, the French word facile is much more common, so I probably referred to that. There are also certain Greek letter strings that I needed such as 'ch' for /k/ in chronology, or the 'y' in dialysis (like the more common analysis).

Learning by doing
It was also quite a kinesthetic process. My fingers just typed many of the words, or at least parts of those words. The ones I got wrong (oh yes, there were certainly several of those!) tended to be words that I never normally write and that I couldn't relate to any other words or parts of words. And I think my spelling was worse than usual because the words were out of context. I believe that if I'd been writing them as part of a text they would have been more likely to flow out accurately - but perhaps I'm just making excuses!

Teaching and learning spelling
So what does all this tell us about teaching and learning spelling:

• sound indicates spelling sometimes but is probably the least reliable route. And if your pronunciation isn't too good anyway, it could mislead you.
• visual methods of spelling should be encouraged - it's what good spellers do, and weaker spellers can learn to 'see' words too.
• it's worth learning, or at least noticing, some orthographic patterns - great to refer to when we are unsure.
• for long words, breaking them up morphologically can really help. Learners need to know a range of affixes and rules for adding them to words.
• semantic links between words need to be explored and spelling patterns will emerge that often explain a spelling that at first looks completely irregular
• an acknowledgement that English is rather a mongrel of a language and an awareness of some common spellings handed down from different languages can be helpful
• the more we write, the better our spelling gets as it becomes increasingly automatic - both in terms of words and letter strings, so learners need to write often and meaningfully. Writing for an audience will encourage them to aim for accuracy.

And all that, my friends, is what my book (soon to be published) is about - with plenty of activities to help learners discover and practise. For more about it click on the cover below: