Some people have a way with words. Othurs not weigh haf. According to the Times of London, it could just be your genes.
In the past, poor spelling was attributed to all manner of things, from bad schooling to a lack of moral fibre. But science is offering a new explanation. A difficulty with spelling could be rooted in your genes and in the way that your brain is wired. These findings stem from research into the language disorder dyslexia, but they are proving important for the wider population. Biology, it seems, not only influences those with dyslexia but also people without the syndrome. If you are a bad speller you can blame your grey matter.
Simply deciphering the written word is the most complex task your brain will face says John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University Medical School, who notes that written language is a relatively recent invention. “It was invented only 5,000 years ago, notes Stein. “It is piggybacked on to our linguistic ability, which was invented 30,000-40,000 years ago. The consequence is that many people fail to read or spell.”
When you read things like this, count your spoons. With all due respect, Prof Stein doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction of my recent DPhil:
“Reading pedagogy in English-speaking countries could be compared to Ptolemaic cosmology. Vast amounts of data have been collected and analysed—but the dominant theories have no predictive value. They are based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of learning to read. The leading scholars in the field continue to circle in ever-more-complex epicycles, but the problems caused by their errors are not merely of academic significance. At least a quarter of our children spend their formative years in a state of confusion and humiliation because they can barely read.
“Yet teaching children to read with synthetic phonics is extremely simple, as a small number of radical teachers have proved. Their insights are hardly comparable to those of Kepler and Newton, but they are nonetheless resisted by the academy with remarkable determination. And not without reason—for if teaching children to read is really that simple, vast areas of academic activity at once become redundant. Even worse, the ‘profession’ of teaching is laid bare as a massive fraud.”
The result actually doesn’t surprise me. I spell badly, and not only does my daughter spell badly, she spells badly in just the same way as I do (throw all the right letters in, but in a mish-mash order).
Interestingly, phonics helped me a lot as a kid — though there are plenty of words phonics doesn’t help you spell — but I have to say it did almost NOTHING for my daughter. In the reading test she took in first and second grade she consistently scored higher on overall fluency and comprehension than on the specific phonics skills. The whole idea of sounding out words, either to read them or to figure out how to spell them, just doesn’t come naturally to her.
My daughter has always been “spelling challenged.” When she was in 4th grade, her teacher told me in parent conference that my daughter would always be a “pattern speller.” “Okay”, I thought, “but many English words don’t follow patterns–then what?” My daughter (who by the way has excellent comprehension/critical reading skills) has shed some light on her difficulties with non patterned words. She indicated to me that when she reads, she does not always read whole lines of text, or even whole words. Depending on the difficulty of the content and the detail needed for retention, she skims pretty much down the center of each page. She is able to read quickly because she understands the context of sentence and word fragments and can piece it all together in the end. She does not really pay attention to particular spellings since it is not always critical to understanding the main ideas associated with the text. Now I understand why she was accomplished as a dancer, since dancers many times work in a similar fashion: they view the whole choreography, learn large chunks of it and then refine (attend to details) as they approach performance.
I happen to be an excellent speller as is my son. My husband, a writer, also has a gift for spelling recall. Being familiar with multiple intelligence theories I can honestly say that while my daughter was in elementary school, she used shaving cream to help her practice her weekly spelling lists. She drew diagrams of the spelling words and I quizzed her by asking her to write and recite her words as well. Once we discovered that she could process anything through auditory means, she made better spelling progress by “think aloud” spelling when studying. Even audiotapes proved helpful.
While I would not disavow a genetic basis for spelling challenges and dyslexia, I believe that perhaps a close examination of the preferred learning styles of a child may shed light on how students can best overcome what can no doubt be an embarrassing skill deficit.