The best part of my job? Working with over 100 teachers and being able to access their classrooms. I feel at times my life is a giant Pinterest board where I get to steal the best ideas from some amazingly creative teachers. When I go back to classroom teaching, I will be spoilt for choice with my collection of best practice ready to go.
The worst part of my job? My inner spelling and grammar stickler wanting to correct all the displays, marked work and posters in the rooms.
I admit it. I am that person who corrects people on their grammar and spelling. Don’t get me wrong, I love to see a Starbucks cup with some creative letter combinations, but the last place I should be able to find an errant ‘definately’ or ‘should of’ is in a primary school classroom. Is the fact that national spelling and grammar standards are dropping is because the people, who should be teaching our students the skills and rules, don’t know them themselves?
I was educated in Australia during the late 80s and early 90s when ‘whole-language learning’ was the latest rage. While I was the child who fit the bill for whole-language as I read profusely and could comprehend above age-level texts, it simply didn’t work for me. I was a woeful speller, terrible at grammar, and punctuation was practically non-existent. English spelling is hard. 26 letters, which make 44 sounds and over 240 combinations of those letters to make those sounds. There is no way kids can be expected to just ‘know them.’ They need to be taught. Surely, I am not the only teacher who didn’t know their digraphs from their diphthongs? How can we expect teachers to teach the content and skills when they don’t know it themselves?
But here’s the thing. Now, I do know how to spell and I know some sophisticated grammar; so what changed from being in school to now? Two things.
I learnt a second language:
Learning a second language (Italian) meant that grammar needed to be taught because I could no longer rely on ‘it doesn’t sound right’ when my nouns and subjects didn’t agree. The whole-language approach relied on my parents and teachers correcting me when I used ‘catched’ and ‘can’ instead of ‘may’. When you’re learning a second language, you need to know why a word choice is or isn’t correct. Explicit teaching of grammar taught me everything I needed to know for composing well-structured and comprehensive pieces of writing.
I taught using a spelling programme:
Lucky for me, I worked in a school that was proactive about their diminishing spelling results. It was decided all students would learn to spell through a direct instruction programme. It wasn’t until I taught the programme that I truly learned the spelling rules I use and teach today. I now know when I need to double a consonant, what a morphograph is and how there is no such thing as a silent letter, but one of the many combinations to make a sound. I can also work out how to spell a new word by applying those learned spelling rules.
What really concerns me is watching how spelling is taught today. Students are being exposed daily to incorrect spelling from the world around them, and for some, their teachers. Teachers are unable to articulate why we double certain letters when building on words, why there are patterns in words or the etymology of a base word. Random lists of words go home for ‘look, cover, write, check’ ready for a Friday spelling test, with no real retention or understanding occurring. Instead, strategies like; asking Siri, using the dictation function or using a word you know how to spell instead, are all becoming common practice.
These strategies have me thinking and asking a lot of questions. Is this a common trend? Is it actually a problem and if so, how do we fix it? Were you taught how to spell at school, or were you one of the lucky ones who just got it? How does your school teach spelling? I’m intrigued…
