Students and parents from the faculty and Laie community gathered in the School of Education for a workshop entitled “How To Teach Spelling” on Saturday, Nov. 9. Hosted by Barbara Hong, professor of Special Education and the special assistant to the vice president of Access, Inclusion, Diversity and Equity (AIDE), the workshop taught the attendees about how to teach children English spelling properly, so they would be able to excel in school.
“What is important is not that I know some rules, but how I present them," she said. "This is where you confuse kids because of all the different spelling rules.” Hong added how the English language, in particular, has many exceptions, which makes learning spelling difficult.
After a round of self-introductions by those attending, including Dr. Melissa Glenn, assistant professor of Music, and her daughter, as well as several parents who brought their young children, Dr. Hong passed out binders to each table. In the binders were several charts of sight words and spelling criteria for children.
“Because it is not taught as much in school, no student will want to ask those questions, and if they spell something wrong, they are called a bad speller,” noted Hong.
Hong added how, in some cases, non-native English speakers are better spellers than native English speakers because they are taught the rules. She said it is a flaw when teachers expect students to be able to spell, simply because they speak English.
“It’s the same as assuming someone can read if they can write. The one thing we need to connect reading with writing is a child’s ability to spell, which is why it must be taught.”
She then pulled up several slides of elementary school children’s spelling, which included several mistakes resulting in the kids accidentally writing expletives. Hong elaborated on how parents might often assume that just because their children can sound out letters, it automatically means they can spell.
By the end of second grade, according to Hong, a child must have established a set of rules to make them conscientious about how they write. If they have a foundation for spelling, they are on the right track. She then pulled up a slide of her own children’s spelling lists. On her daughter’s third-grade spelling list, the instructions were to write down the words many times, with the hope that her daughter would be able to memorize them.
According to Hong, most children, by the age of six, will have developed intonation, and children learn their pronunciation through role models.
It is also important the way the word is broken down when it is taught to children. “As a speaker, auditorily, I should be able to blend the letters together to make a word. In the word ‘stop,’ I must be able to blend these four letters to make a word. Children must also be able to remember each phoneme makes one sound, not two. And then, they can remember how they manipulate them.”
In a word like “ghost,” a child cannot know how to spell it properly just by sounding it out, because of the “h,” and so the sequencing of the letters makes a large difference in spelling it properly.
Certain letter combinations and their placement also affect how words will be pronounced by children, such as the combination of “ch.” Words such as “ache, school, and choir” will all sound different based on the letters, particularly the vowels which are before or after the combination of “ch.”
No I before E except after C
Hong then pulled up a slide of several different words and a sign at a gas station she had visited, which misspelled the word “receipt,” which did not follow the oft-quoted “I before e except after c” rule.
“This rule is more confusing than anything. How many times have you actually used it?” she asked the audience. “Because there are more exceptions than actual usage.”
While there were words that followed the “rule,” there were even more words that did not, such as “ancient,” “efficient,” and the aforementioned “receipt.”
“There will always be a lot of exceptions,” Hong said. “By third grade, we want our children to look at different spelling patterns and how different sounds affect the words. If you give your kid some confidence in his or her spelling, they will always be open to the challenges of the English language.”
After instructing the class in several more spelling techniques and myths, Hong thanked everyone for coming and encouraged them to take what they had learned with them.
“How is putting the words in alphabetical order or asking them to be repeated going to help with spelling?” She also insisted that writing the definition of a word was not an effective means to help a child learn spelling either. “Just because you know the meaning of catastrophic doesn’t mean you can spell the word.”
Gaoyang Yang, a senior student of Dr. Hong’s special education class from China and majoring in TESOL, said she wanted to use Hong’s instruction to be able to teach children spelling effectively. “I think it is so important to allow kids to build up that foundation for a kid’s later speech and development.”
One of the attendees, Jacob Titus, an alumnus from Wahiawa, Hawaii, said, “I thought it was really enlightening, and some of what was discussed today I learned in her class. But it was nice to get a full, in-depth, hour-and-a-half-long lesson about spelling and how we as Americans don’t know what the heck we’re doing. Growing up, you hear English as a normal thing, but it’s such a cocktail made up of different languages.”
Titus said while he did not consider himself a bad speller, he would probably not be able to explain all of the so-called “rules” for spelling. “As messed up as English is, there are rules you can learn which can assist you in spelling, as opposed to sheer memorization, which is what I think I have been doing.”
Titus, who graduated in communications, is planning to go into theatre education in the future and said he was grateful to Dr. Hong for giving him more in-depth instruction on how to teach spelling.
“Sound it out”
In spelling bees, Hong pointed out how contestants can only ask questions about the word’s definition, part of speech, usage and origin, but not how to sound it out, even though when spelling is taught in school, students are instructed to “sound it out.”
Hong set out to “debunk the myth of sounding-out.” One of the main issues with sounding out words is speech difficulty in children. “Think of a child, four years old, who just lost his two front teeth. He cannot make certain sounds. Sounds in words all have different formations depending on the child. There may be 26 letters, but there are 44 phonemes.”
In language, a phoneme is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another. Despite there being 26 letters, these different letters can be combined into many different configurations. Each affects the way a speaker pronounces them. In a word like “box,” there alone exists four phonemes.