-> The following is from Spel...Is A Four-Letter Word by J. Richard
-> Gentry.
-> Parents who have listened to their children babble, speak their first
-> words, and eventually advance to mature speech have seen language
-> develop as a constructive process over time. Pointing out to them the
-> importance of babbling, for eventual speech competency will help them
-> understand the importance of hypothesizing and testing ideas about
-> spelling for eventual spelling competency.
->
-> Learning to spell is like learning to speak: babbling, first words,
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
-> two-word utterances, and later mature speech represent developmental
-> stages in the constructive process of  learning to speak.
With all due respect to Mr. Gentry, while this is an appealing notion
(that learning to spell is like learning to speak) I believe it to be
fundamentally in error. I don't have the time to devote to this
discussion that I would like. If I did I'd obtain copies of this book
(do you have a copy?) and look in the Bibliography for what scientific
studies he cites to support this point of view. I suspect it is only an
appealing notion with no basis in scientific fact.
Learning to spell is NOT like learning to speak. Learning to speak is
MUCH more  complicated. Not only does the child have to learn to
ennunciate the phonemes of the language, something most children are
able to do--but some with physical malformations may not be able to
do--but even more than that the child must construct for himself the
meaning, not only of many individual words, but also the entire GRAMMAR
of the language. What is always amazing to me is that a child is able
(in most cases) construct the entire mechanics of the grammar of a
language only by listening to others around him speaking the language,
and most kids accomlish this before the age of 5.
It is also, as I understand it the case that when a child is learning a
language (the language acquisition process), that depending on the
language which the child is immersed in, certain neuro-pathways in the
brain will be used with more frequency than others. The less used
pathways eventually disappear over time and with age, which is one of
the reasons that person over the age of 10 have a much harder time
learning a language.
I doubt that these specifics are characteristic of learning to spell,
which is a much less complicated task. The child already knows the
language, the syntax, the meaning of individual words. All the child is
learning to do is put a written representation of the word onto paper.
Granted, this is difficult for some students, and English has many more
exceptions to phonetic spelling than other languages such as Spanish and
German, so I'll bet it is much harder to learn to spell English than
Spanish or German. But, this is still in no way analogous to the process
of language acquistion. It seems an appealing analogy, but I believe it
to be a false one.
->       * development from simple to complex
->       * development from concrete to abstract representation
->       * self-correction
->       * refinement
->       * successive approximation of correct spelling
I'd more willing subscribe to statements Chuck Beams has made, in which
he points out that persons (children) who are exposed to incorrect
spellings initially, which must be corrected, end up having greater
difficulty learning correct spelling.
-> Prephonemic Spelling:
-> No obviously relationship between the letters or letter-like shapes
-> used and the conventional spelling. The child has not discovered the
-> phonetic principle, which is the notion that letters represent the
-> speech sounds or phonemes in words. hence letter strings that look
-> like writing, but do not work as writing works.
-> When children string letters together without attempting to represent
-> speech sounds in any systematic way, they are spelling
-> prephonemically. Prephonemic spellers usually have not learned to
-> read, but they appear to know a lot about written language. They know
-> how letters are formed and that they are supposed to represent
-> language, some way..
Yes, my children went through this phase. They would write down letters
on the paper (or close approximations of letters), since they had
learned their alphabet and recognized the individual letters. But what
they wrote was often something like this:
" PPPTYQZYXAAMBT" or something along those lines.
This isn't even CLOSE to spelling. This is an imitation of what they see
adults doing. Certainly the kid has made the connection that language
can somehow be represented on paper. But spelling implies (at least to
me) some attempt to put letters in an order that corresponds to the
accepted written form of a word in our language. Since this child has no
concept of an "accepted written form" to strive for, what they are doing
can't be called "spelling". It is merely a cute immitation of what the
child sees adults doing. I'm sure it is an important stage for the child
to go through, motivationally, but other than that...
-> These children have discovered the phonetic principle - they know
-> basically how spelling works. But there is a curious limitation to
-> early phonemic spelling. the children write down letters for only one
-> or two sounds in a word, then stop. Thus, spelling in which letters
-> are used to represent sounds, but only very sparsely, is called early
-> phonemic spelling. One phoneme represented, e.g. s for six or u for
-> view. Sometimes children in the early phonemic spelling stage will
-> identify and spell one or two phonemes in a word and then finish the
-> word out with a random string of letters.
I know this is common in Whole Language classrooms, because the children
are asked to begin writing before they've even really learned to read. I
question the wisdom in this, but have no way of supporting that with any
evidence.
Sheila
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