In the States, we have spelling bees. These are done one word at a time, usually with the classroom divided in teams. Each team lines up on one side of the room, and teacher reads a word. The person at the head of line A tries to spell the word correctly out loud. If it’s wrong, then the person at the head of line B tries the same word. It goes back and forth between teams until the word is spelled correctly, then the same thing starts with another word. If a student misspells the word, they normally have to quit playing, meaning that by the end of the game, only the best two or three spellers remain.
The exact rules depend on the age group and the venue, but there are official spelling bees, including a national spelling bee that is held once a year. It’s only for school kids, but it’s always one word at a time, although the participant can request that the word be used in a sentence before trying to spell it.
:: shakes himself to relieve the horrors ::
We most certainly had dictées in French class in our run-of-the-mill non-immersion small-town Canadian (Whitby, Ontario) highschool back in the seventies. Even after all these years I remember them. twitch
As others have said, they’re to test comprehension of larger blocks of text than a single word. French is more regularly spelt than English; so much of its trickery is in how words join. I used to say that French was regularly misspelt and English was irregularly misspelt.
When I studied in Madrid, my classmates were surprised that we taught spelling as a subject, let alone had spelling bees. Spelling in Spanish is not much of a challenge.
Actually, while it is relatively easy to go from spelling to pronunciation in French, it is quite a bit more difficult to go from pronunciation to spelling. In other words, while any given letter combination is generally pronounced only one way (with some exceptions), there may be several different ways to spell a particular string of sounds. Add to that all of the “silent” letters that are tacked onto the ends of words, and it really isn’t very regular.
For example, the verb /asist/ could be spelled assiste, assistes, or assistent, depending on its subject.
The word /fasõ/ could be spelled façon or façons correctly, but the spellings fasson and fassons would not violate any French spelling rules. (cf. passons)
Then there are just unpredictable ways of spelling things. For example, why does dictionnaire have two n’s, and appartement have two p’s? (I don’t expect an answer–I realize that it is a question of etymology, but the average Francophone would not know the historic roots of the word.) Net and nette are pronounced the same, but not jet and jette. (In fact, jet rhymes with trait, succès, and paix.)
Add in liaison, ellipsis, and other fun games with sounds that French does, and going from the audio to the written really isn’t all that easy.
Thinking about it, it might be the reason why spelling exercise are done word by word in english-speaking countries, and with whole texts in France (or at least you need whole sentences). Manger, mangé, mangées, mangés, mangeait, mangeaient are all pronounced the same, for instance. Without a whole sentence, there’s no way to tell whether or not you can spell this verb correctly and apropriately in its various forms. If the teacher pronounce the word and ask you to spell it, any version is correct. Meanwhile, if he says “la tarte qu’il a mangée”, or “il a mangé la tarte” or “habituellement, il mangeait la tarte” you have to learn your grammar to make the correct choice.
While with english, with very few different forms for verbs (and all sounding different), no gender for words, and the plural sounded, there’s no possible mistake so you only need to know how to write the various forms individually. The teacher just need to say “ate”, and ask you to spell it. Adding a whole sentence wouldn’t change anything.
There must be a reason, because, from what I gather in this thread, people don’t get english dictations in english speaking countries, but they do get french dictations when they learn french. And similarily, we do have french dictations in France, but there’s no dictation when we’re learning english. So, it’s related to the language you’re taught, no to local teaching customs.
clairobscur, the same problem exists in English. Admittedly we don’t have the difficulties of gender agreement, conjugated verbs and silent endings that result in confusions like il venait / ils venaient. But we do have words that sound the same but are spelt differently e.g. there / their / they’re
I assume that was why we used to do dictations when I was in primary school, where we had a subject specifically called Spelling and Dictation. The nun would read out a passage like:
Where are the boys ? They’re over there in the park, playing with their kites.
and we’d have to write it out, correctly distinguishing and spelling the similar sounding words.
Japanese has some formal tests for kanji proficiency, but they don’t commonly have public contests. The tests are sometimes useful for employment or school. Even the students at my current school, which is not that academically oriented, commonly take the Kanji Kentei. Passing the first level means that you thoroughly know over 6,000 characters. Most college students could pass anything up to about level 2 or so with some studying, but level 1 is pretty darn hard, from what I’ve heard.
I assume you know that ‘eight’ is also an acceptable spelling for that syllable in English. It means something completely different but you cannot tell unless it’s used in a sentence.
But beyond that and other exceptions, you’re largely right. English doesn’t seem to have near as many homophones (different words with the same pronunciation) as French.
I did dictées in French class in grade school and high school, as many people here, but I also did them in English class (as a second language) in high school. I don’t know if this is unusual, but no one else seems to have mentioned it. I’ve never seen anything like a spelling bee in French, but the dictée is probably the closest thing.
Now, to brag a little (I don’t do it often, so I hope you can forgive me :D). In the first link posted by Exapno Mapcase, we see the following post:
I have to say that I have won the Dictée des Amériques a few years ago. OK, I was a junior, and since I’m a senior, I can’t seem to be able to qualify for the final anymore, but anyway. On the other hand, I haven’t been recognized in the street for this reason. One person I met did mention it to me after Googling my name, though.
These are done one word at a time, usually with the classroom divided in teams. Each team lines up on one side of the room, and teacher reads a word. The person at the head of line A tries to spell the word correctly out loud. If it’s wrong, then the person at the head of line B tries the same word. It goes back and forth between teams until the word is spelled correctly, then the same thing starts with another word. If a student misspells the word, they normally have to quit playing, meaning that by the end of the game, only the best two or three spellers remain.