Invented (or Inventive) Spelling

Let’s talking about Invented Spelling.

This site describes it like this:

Proponents seem to think that it is a good intermediate step in a child’s cognitive development, one that comes before and while a child is memorizing the spelling of words. These are two of the first sites that I found that discuss it:

http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules/invented-spelling.html

Opponents seem to dismiss it as a foolish idea that is ruining our youth, but I haven’t really read why. This site says

However, it is my understanding that Invented Spelling is not so much taught but tolerated, and that it’s basically recognizing and encouraging children when they show that they recognize that certain letters make certain sounds, and spell words in a way that is logical.

Two years ago Sunrazor twice dismissed it, while alluding to his upcoming work on his master’s thesis on the subject, so I hope he will pop in.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=476787&highlight=inventive+spelling (post 6)
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=473197&highlight=inventive+spelling (post 14)

Thoughts? Opinions? Research findings?

  • Rucksinator
    (grad student in elementary education who doesn’t yet know if he can teach younger grades because he wants to correct every misspelled word, and with the 2nd grade class that he’s been observing, that is sometimes almost every word)

Disclaimer: This is for school, by I’m not asking anybody to do my homework. I just didn’t find this apparently contentious subject debated here.

I don’t know nothing and I’m not an educator in even the allegorical sense, but I see nothing inherently wrong with a happy medium here - say perhaps noting misspellings and giving the correct spellings on the handed-back papers, but putting some kind of cap on the damage it can do to the final grade, allowing them to be recognized for the literary value of their Chaucerian prose as well.

Who cares? People use spell checkers and computers now. Are they still teaching children to use those old fashioned pencil thingies?

This is an old argument in the Mercan language regarding spelling, pronunciation, punctuation, and grammar. The rules are arbitrary. There’s nothing wrong with maintaining a standard, and including adherence to a standard in the educational process, but the goal is provide a means of communication. There are numerous great works of literature that throw the rules out the window. There is also a necessity for standard language to provide precision in technical writing. I don’t see how the two are incompatible.

I learned to read with phonics because I had no patience for the word recognition method being used in the first grade. It wasn’t until the sixth grade that I became proficient in spelling. Then before I had graduated from High School, I began to use my memory for more important matters than spelling. I find it hard to believe that there can be, or should be, only one path towards the development of communication skills.

I suppose that like short division it has its place developmentally, but it should not be allowed to go on uncorrected very long because you don’t want the incorrect spelling to become ingrained; it certainly shouldn’t still be going unremarked upon in the third grade. Gently showing the child the correct spellings and praising how close they came to the correct forms do not need to be mutually exclusive, but the latter must be done fairly early on because few kids take the initiative to seek out the correct spellings on their own.

As a slight aside, I’m not at all surprised that the quote in the link is from 1999. That’s the year I was taught four methods of teaching English, two of which involved not correcting spelling until the final drafts. And as someone who sees thousands of pieces of student writing a year, I feel pretty confident in saying that never correcting the spellings as we were encouraged not to makes for a lot of crappy spellers, such as high schoolers who think maybe is spelled mabye, and that commerce involves “saleing” things.

I not only allow invented spelling in my second-graders’ writing: I require it.

Here’s why:

I expect second-graders to begin the year able to write a coherent, sequenced story of at least five sentences describing an event that has occurred in their own lives. By the end of the year, that story should be much longer, should include dialogue and details, should have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and should meet several other criteria.

Advanced students may become proficient at the use of a dictionary in second grade for the purposes of looking up an unfamiliar word. Struggling students will not be proficient in this skill: it’ll take them far too long for it to be a worthwhile return on energy at this age. (They’ll still learn the skill, they just won’t be efficient at it). I’ve not yet met the second grader who’s proficient at using a dictionary to find a word that they’re not sure how to spell.

Given these expectations, I have three options.

The first is that, every time a student hits a difficult word in their writing, they stop, raise their hand, and wait for me to come by to tell them how to spell that word. Many of them really REALLY want to take this approach, and it absolutely torpedoes their writing: if I’m in the midst of a conference with a different student on brainstorming ideas or on writing sequentially or on planning a story or whatever, it can be several minutes before I’m free to help them with spelling. Multiply this times my entire class, and you’ll see it’s an unworkable approach.

The second is that they write only using words they know how to spell. This will torpedo their ability to write interesting stories: they can’t describe the butterfly they found in their garden, or the trip to the emergency room when they busted their head open, or the time they visited their grandfather in Arizona. Instead, they can write about the cat and the rat that it sat on. If I’m trying to teach students to value their ability to express themselves via the written word and to do so powerfully and gracefully, this approach is unworkable.

The third approach is the one I take. Within the first week of school, I teach students a mantra: “Spell it the best you can, and move on.” After that lesson, any time they ask me how to spell a word, I repeat the mantra back to them.

This isn’t to say that spelling doesn’t count. I just finished assessing my students on 86 different common spelling patterns, ranging from the sounds of the short vowels in CVC words to the need to double the terminal consonant when appending the -ing suffix to a CVC word. I entered results into a homebrew spreadsheet, and each student now has an individualized spelling curriculum based on the spelling patterns they still need to learn. Students are accountable in their writing for the spelling patterns that they’ve learned. Once a student studies the -ed ending, I’d better not read about how they walkt to the store. Remember in the third paragraph when I mentioned “several other criteria”? Correct spelling of studied patterns is one of those criteria.

When they’ve finished studying the spelling patterns, I’ll start giving them other lists: lists of commonly misspelled words, lists of words misspelled in their own writing, possibly even self-chosen lists of difficult words (this depends on the student and, frankly, on the year–I’m still not sure whether this approach can be effective at this age). Any word that they’ve studied either in spelling or in one of the twice-weekly (on average) phonics lessons is going to be one that I expect them to spell correctly.

But I’m not going to require a second-grader to know how to spell “emergency” before writing about the emergency room. I’m also not going to hand back papers covered in red ink of spelling corrections: there’s absolutely zero evidence that such an approach improves spelling.

Maybe because the ability to use a dictionary to find a word that they’re not sure how to spell, requires the skill of invented spelling.

Heh :).

Actually, I think it’s a difficult skill for many adults, as well. I know it’s frustrated me on more than one occasion. It’s a skill similar to getting a good search result from Google: you’ve got to be creative, flexible, and persistent in your attempt to find what you’re looking for.

As a kid I was a great speller and a great reader, but nothing frustrated me more than being told to “Look in the dictionary” when I asked someone to spell a word. Like **LHOD **says, it broke my concentration to go searching for a word I wasn’t sure about. I had a word in mind - that was the word I wanted to use, and I was just asking for help in spelling. I never understood the mentality of teaching someone to look it up. I was taught using phonics, and it was never considered acceptable to invent a spelling and move on. Had that been the case, I would have been saved a lot of frustration. It’s not a matter of laziness or lack of curiousity, just wanting to use that perfect word. Break out the red pen while grading it and I’ll know how to spell it correctly next time, but let me use the word!
/long-festering rant

Just a thought, but how about making the correctly-spelled version homework? Then they get to teach themselves correct spelling without taking up your time. And it’s motivation - spell it correctly the first time and they then don’t have homework. Just don’t repeat the exercise too frequently.

Seems like common sense to me. Yes, you want to teach the children the proper spelling, but children make a lot of grammar and spelling errors and if you correct everything a child says all the time, they will be discouraged. I remember an English teacher of mine once mentioned during a grammar lesson that her daughter had recently told her “I runned all the way home.” We expected the teacher to say she’d corrected her daughter, but she said she didn’t do that. The important thing was that her daughter understood the past tense and how to use it. It didn’t matter that she’d made a mistake on an irregular verb.

They just learn to spell fonetically.

Why do education theorists think they can just makes shit up and not have to use double blind studies to determine if a new pedagogy is effective? People learned to read, write, and spell just fine back in the days of phonics and crossing out mis-spellings in red ink.

Whole language, invented spelling, new math, it’s all just bullshit as far as I am concerned.

And then on the other hand we have dedicated teachers using thoughtful methods like Left Hand of Dorkness to make me look like an idiot. :smack:

But that’s the point, LHoD doesn’t want the child to feel they must spell it correctly the first time. He wants the child to use difficult words in their writing without fear. Knowing how to spell them will come in due time.

I love how my six-year-old fearlessly writes words she’s heard but never seen, like “aquamarine,” which she rendered as something like “okwamyrn.” I can’t imagine wanting to discourage her from seizing the language as her own.

FWIW, I read the OP’s first quote and thought, “Okay, I don’t see anything controversial about that.”

Then I read the second quote, and when I got as far as “Children who have been taught invented spelling” I thought, “Hey, wait a minute! Either you’re missing the point, or I am.” I was under the impression, from reading the first quote, that “invented spelling” isn’t taught—it’s what children come up with on their own. And it’s a good sign, because it shows that, even though the kid doesn’t know the correct spelling of that particular word, he knows how spelling works.

Yep. Many kids, especially the ones who are decent spellers, are by nature perfectionists. Misspelling a word is the Worst Thing Ever. I’ve dealt with tears and temper tantrums when I’ve refused to give a kid the spelling of a word. But if I relent–if I do offer the spelling–then suddenly sixteen little hands shoot up across the classroom, hands that should be holding pencils, and thirty two little eyes stare at me, waiting for me to come to them next to spell salmon or carousel or sledding or video game or whatever.

So I put zero pressure on them to spell correctly words that they lack the foundation to spell correctly. If anything, it’s negative pressure: in the initial lesson on “doing the best you can and moving on,” I deliberately misspell a couple of words in a story, then point out that I did so, and explain that that’s okay.

For the better spellers, I do put those words on spelling lists later in the year. The problem with having kids correct the spelling as homework is that they’re seven, and they’re still learning the basics of how spelling works. A list that contained monkey bars, suddenly, bloody, emergency, hospital, and bandage might be thematically linked, but it’s not linked in terms of patterns, and the struggling spellers aren’t likely to pick up on the nuances of spelling from it. I’d rather give them lists that emphasize a particular feature each week, then ask them to practice what they’ve already learned in future stories.

No worries, DanBlather, although I’m glad I saw your second post before responding to your first :).

I do want to respond to this, though. What would a double-blind study of a new pedagogy look like? I can’t imagine any way you could conduct such a study and have any pedagogy taught in anything resembling an effective manner.

There are plenty of studies with control groups of pedagogical techniques, however. I don’t know of specific studies around the provisional acceptance of invented spelling, but I’d be interested in seeing some.

I saw the results of a comparison between Whole Language used in elementary schools in one district (I think 3 or 4 elementary schools) for a two year period, to the preceding two years where traditional methods had been used. I was surprised to see that the results of grading and test scores showed a decline of about 4%. That’s pretty small. There may have been a lot of factors that biased the comparison, but some teachers told me at the time it wasn’t too surprising. They didn’t think particular educational techniques made that much of a difference. Their opinion was that kids have a level of capability in school based on the teacher and their home life, that wouldn’t affect their performance by much.

Another thread about educational reform had a cite claiming that educational techniques were ineffective outside of very low performing schools. Maybe they’re all right. I usually assume that educational reforms are a substitute for the changes schools and the government can’t do, getting parents more involved with their children’s education.

I remember when I was in first grade, I was writing about my vacation plans for the summer and I wanted to use a particular verb, except that it could be conjugated in two different ways, both with the same pronunciation. I didn’t know how to choose between both spellings at the time (and to be honest many other native speakers of my language can’t tell them apart even as adults). I think I spent 10 minutes or so trying to figure out which one went there, and I ended up choosing the wrong one. :smack: :wink: My teacher knew I wasn’t at a level to know how to choose the correct spelling and didn’t even correct the mistake.