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Teaching and Assessing Spelling. Literacy Leadership

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Good spelling is a result of good teaching. Misty Adoniou speaks to what spelling is and the threads of the spelling tapestry.

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 27, 2023

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This video video is a detailed discussion about the importance of spelling, emphasizing that it goes beyond merely arranging letters correctly. Good spelling reflects strong reading comprehension and effective writing skills, and it is about effectively communicating meaning to a reader. The speaker critiques common teaching methods that focus on rote memorization without fostering an understanding of the meanings behind words and their structures.

The discussion includes the linguistic aspects involved in spelling, such as phonology (the sounds of words), morphology (the meaningful parts of words), and orthography (the rules of spelling). The speaker highlights that spelling is not a natural ability but a learned skill, necessitating proper instruction that incorporates meaning from the beginning of education.

The speaker argues that understanding the origins of words (etymology) and their components is crucial for spelling proficiency. They advocate for teaching young children about word structure and origins, using examples like the word "jumped" to illustrate how morphemes work. Additionally, the speaker emphasizes the need for a comprehensive spelling curriculum that includes all these elements and encourages exploration from an early age, rather than deferring complex spelling instruction until later stages of education.

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00:00.685 --> 00:02.405
I think the general public might just think

00:02.405 --> 00:04.725
that good spelling is getting all the letters in the right

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order so that people don't n****r when you

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make a spelling mistake.

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But good spelling's more than that,

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good spelling is indicative of,

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good reading comprehension.

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Good spelling is indicative of good writing.

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So it's not just about making sure

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that people don't make fun of you.

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Um, it really is strongly connected to being able to read

00:25.245 --> 00:26.245
and write well as well.

00:26.785 --> 00:30.405
So I, I think that people have this idea that spelling is

00:30.405 --> 00:32.605
as simple as putting all the letters in the right order

00:32.605 --> 00:34.245
because that's what they've learned at school.

00:34.625 --> 00:38.965
We tend to reward letters in the right order with the tick

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and letters in the wrong order with the cross.

00:41.865 --> 00:45.205
Uh, we don't really, teach spelling.

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We do that kind of testing.

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Did you get all the letters in the right order?

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And it's such a simplistic way

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of understanding what spelling is.

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Um, we think about it, spelling is really trying

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to communicate meaning to a reader.

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That's what you're trying to do.

01:01.125 --> 01:03.965
You're trying to represent a little meaningful thing like a

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word, and put it down on a piece of paper

01:06.145 --> 01:08.085
and have a reader understand it.

01:08.305 --> 01:10.525
And for them to understand, we have to all agree

01:10.525 --> 01:12.285
that it must be spelled in a particular way.

01:12.745 --> 01:14.765
So spelling is a representation of

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meaning rather than just this random exercise in trying

01:19.445 --> 01:22.325
to put letters in a particular order.

01:23.185 --> 01:27.885
So I think that really, it's bad spelling instruction

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that we're more interested in,

01:29.785 --> 01:31.725
and that instruction is instruction

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that doesn't focus on meaning in spelling.

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And instead just says, I'm gonna give you 10 words

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to go home and learn off by heart,

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and on Friday I want you to write them.

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And there's never really been any

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instruction around those words.

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And very often the kids don't even know

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what those words mean.

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Nobody seems interested in that.

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They've just been given a list

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of words to go home and learn.

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So good instruction would start with this kind

01:57.045 --> 01:59.245
of linguistic understanding that a word

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is a representation of meaning.

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Now we think of that little meaning as a, as a canvas.

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So I'm gonna take a word as an example, right? So beautiful.

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Now, beautiful. That little canvas word, has a meaning

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of being pleasing to my eye or pleasing to my senses.

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But how do you spell that word?

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Like if I wanna write that word down

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and communicate it to somebody else, I have to think,

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how will I represent that meaning on a piece of paper?

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And that's what spelling is, right?

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How do I represent the meaning on a piece of paper?

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And to represent that meaning, you need to bring a whole lot

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of linguistic skills to the party.

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You can't just think, what, what sounds can I hear?

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Uh, because that won't help you spell

02:47.245 --> 02:48.805
beautiful as it turns out.

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In fact, just listening for the sounds you can hear,

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won't help you spell most words in English.

02:55.785 --> 02:58.765
So you really need more than what words can I

02:58.765 --> 02:59.765
Hear? So

02:59.765 --> 03:01.565
we need, more knowledge,

03:01.565 --> 03:03.565
more linguistic knowledge in order to spell.

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So sounds are important and we call that phenology.

03:08.225 --> 03:10.485
But other things are important as well.

03:10.895 --> 03:13.565
Morphology are the meaning parts of words.

03:14.025 --> 03:18.045
So I'm gonna take that beautiful little canvas of beautiful,

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and we'll think about the morphology of beautiful.

03:23.265 --> 03:26.325
So morphology, it just means the morphemes in the word

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and morphemes are the meaningful parts of the word.

03:29.345 --> 03:33.885
So beautiful has two meaningful parts, beauty and full.

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Uh, but you can see I can't, I can't make sense

03:38.105 --> 03:40.485
of those morphemes if I don't already know

03:40.485 --> 03:41.885
what the word means means.

03:42.305 --> 03:44.845
So that's why meaning is our little start in canvas.

03:45.305 --> 03:48.725
And then this morphology is a, is a thread that runs

03:48.725 --> 03:50.685
through the canvas to help us spell.

03:51.145 --> 03:53.445
But just knowing the beautiful is made of beauty

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and full, these two morphines is

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insufficient to know how to spell it.

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I still have to figure out, but how do you spell beauty?

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I can hear this u in beauty,

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but apparently I'm gonna have

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to use an EAU pattern to spell

04:11.045 --> 04:12.165
that U sound.

04:12.545 --> 04:16.765
So now we're getting into the orthography of English.

04:17.625 --> 04:21.405
So what are the letter patterns that I will use

04:22.105 --> 04:23.925
for the sounds that I can hear?

04:24.585 --> 04:27.125
And English is not a phonetic language.

04:27.585 --> 04:31.645
So we don't have one letter pattern for every sound we hear.

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We have a range of letter patterns for every sound you hear

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for vowel sounds and you is one of our many vowel sounds.

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We can have up to 20 letter patterns.

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So that's a big choice, right?

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You can't just listen for the sound

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because which of those 20 would you write down

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as a representation of the sound?

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So that brings in etymology.

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So that's another one

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of our beautiful little linguistic threads

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that runs through the canvas.

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And in the canvas of our word, beautiful, we get,

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a French origin of that word.

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And that French origin

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of the word explains why we have an EAU

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because that's a French letter pattern.

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It's a French spelling pattern.

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So that tells us that, hang on.

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Are you saying that English has words from other languages?

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English doesn't just have words from other languages.

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English is made from other languages.

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It's actually in its DNA that it began as a German language.

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Um, by the time of the, those Norman,

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conquest, the William the Conqueror, it became a French

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German hybrid language.

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And then during the Renaissance, it had a huge influx of

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Greek and Latin words.

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And so really if you wanted to unpack the DNA of English,

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it would be French, German, Latin, and Greek.

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And then after the 16 hundreds, just imported many,

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many words from other, languages from countries

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that England was conquering or trading with.

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And so we have a beautiful kind of polygon language.

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So when we're looking at that canvas of that original word,

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beautiful, one of those threads running through one

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of those etymological threads is an exploration of,

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so when did this word come into our language

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and where did it come from?

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Because that's probably gonna give us some clues on which

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letter patterns we are going to write

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for the sounds that we can hear.

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So we can hear in that little canvas

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that we've got for the word beautiful.

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We've got some, morphology running through the thread,

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through the canvas, the thread of morphology,

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the beauty and the full.

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We've got some etymology running through there,

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the French origin of that word beauty to explain that

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orthographical phenomena of the EAU, which all goes back

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to, so that's the sound I can hear.

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So all of those threads run together through that canvas,

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that base canvas of meaning.

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And if you want to be a good speller

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or you want to be a good instructor of spelling,

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you really have to ensure that all

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of those are being covered off

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with the kids that you're teaching.

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If you're deciding that you'd like

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to do this spelling better, because basically spelling is

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not an innate skill.

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It's actually a human construction.

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We can hear by that complicated history that we've got

07:40.045 --> 07:43.925
that it's a, it's a human invention spelling,

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to try and solve this problem.

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How do you communicate meanings

07:47.345 --> 07:49.125
to other people through writing?

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And so if it's a human invention,

07:52.155 --> 07:54.325
then it needs human instruction.

07:54.435 --> 07:56.405
There's actually not a place in the brain

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that was sitting there, just waiting

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for the spelling to happen.

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There's not a spelling gene in us.

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Like we might have a red hair gene or a blue eye gene.

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Um, so it's a, it's a taught skill.

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It's a learned skill, therefore it's a taught skill.

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Um, so what, what would it mean to teach in this way?

08:15.955 --> 08:19.005
Well, essentially it means that those wonderful threads

08:19.005 --> 08:22.805
that run through the canvas become your guide for teaching.

08:23.765 --> 08:26.405
I think currently people,

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might be thinking, well, I do remember doing a bit of,

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Greek etymology around suffix when I was in,

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high school.

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And I think that's the mistake we make

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with spelling instruction.

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We kind of leave the important parts

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for spelling instruction to too late in the process.

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And often we leave it to kids

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who are doing advanced studies.

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Uh, they'll be the ones who can cope with the Latin roots

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or the Greek prefixes.

08:58.265 --> 09:01.365
But actually all kids from the very beginning need

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to be told honestly how English spelling works.

09:05.465 --> 09:07.285
So even in our,

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without our students who's starting in the very beginning

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of school, five year olds coming into school

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can understand the notion that words are, are made

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of meaning parts.

09:19.345 --> 09:22.605
For example, if we were teaching them to write,

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the word jumped, as in I jumped

09:26.745 --> 09:27.885
on the trampoline.

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Then if we just said to them, write down the letters,

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you can hear what sounds can you hear,

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then I can guarantee you that they will write AT

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on the end of jumped

09:42.185 --> 09:45.285
and they will not put a in.

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So they're very likely to write JUMT,

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because that's the sounds they can hear now.

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So clearly they need to be let in on the secret that,

09:58.765 --> 10:00.685
English isn't just about the sounds.

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You can hear the sounds are very important,

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but they're not enough to spell correctly.

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So we can tell very young children,

10:09.665 --> 10:14.205
we can tell five U holds that jumped is made of two parts,

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and that's us talking to them about the morphines of words.

10:18.305 --> 10:23.045
And we can say, jump is made of JUMP that says jump.

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Let's all get up a jump kids.

10:26.865 --> 10:30.925
And then we can say, but on the end of it, it has Ed

10:31.395 --> 10:35.965
because Ed tells us that it happened before.

10:36.985 --> 10:40.565
So now I jump, but yesterday I jumped.

10:41.105 --> 10:44.775
So even though we can hear it's ed,

10:44.775 --> 10:49.535
because Ed is the morphine, it's the suffix that tells us

10:49.535 --> 10:51.175
that it happened in the past.

10:52.155 --> 10:55.775
Now that's for a five-year-old, that's very comprehensible.

10:56.315 --> 10:58.215
And I know it's comprehensible

10:58.215 --> 11:00.415
because five-year-olds come into their first year

11:00.415 --> 11:03.135
of school already using ed

11:03.725 --> 11:07.775
because they say, I see you yesterday.

11:08.695 --> 11:11.735
I go to the beach with mom and dad.

11:12.315 --> 11:17.015
So they already know intuitively that Ed is a suffix

11:17.405 --> 11:21.095
that marks the past because you can hear it in their speech.

11:21.725 --> 11:25.255
What they don't know yet is that it doesn't always

11:25.875 --> 11:29.335
go on the end of a verb to mark the past, but they know it.

11:29.635 --> 11:31.135
So it's easy to teach them.

11:31.555 --> 11:34.695
So that's a good example of how you go about it

11:34.695 --> 11:35.935
with very young children.

11:36.235 --> 11:38.935
And you can do etymology with very young children.

11:39.115 --> 11:43.455
So that word origin material doesn't have to be done

11:43.485 --> 11:45.815
with your advanced kids who are in,

11:45.835 --> 11:47.135
you know, secondary school.

11:47.595 --> 11:49.815
It can be done with very young children as well.

11:50.155 --> 11:53.445
And the place to start is the etymology of their names.

11:54.615 --> 11:56.405
Where do their names come from?

11:56.745 --> 12:00.165
And that's when you find out that Chris,

12:00.415 --> 12:03.085
whose name has a cut at the beginning

12:03.865 --> 12:08.485
but is written with ACH, we find out that, Chris,

12:09.205 --> 12:11.805
I think your name has come from Greek.

12:12.275 --> 12:16.645
Because our Greek origin words have a ch that says

12:17.755 --> 12:20.885
like Christmas and chemist.

12:21.975 --> 12:26.555
And then Charlotte can put up her hand and say, I have C.

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And then we can say, but Charlotte, your

12:31.355 --> 12:33.635
C makes the sound of sh.

12:34.495 --> 12:38.315
And that's because Charlotte, your name comes from French.

12:39.335 --> 12:43.235
And our ch words that make a sh sound have come

12:43.235 --> 12:47.795
to us from French like chef and chandelier

12:48.255 --> 12:51.115
and chauffeur and chateau.

12:51.415 --> 12:54.515
All the posh words have come from the French.

12:55.535 --> 12:59.075
So that's the kind of very fun

12:59.615 --> 13:02.515
and accessible exploration that you can do

13:02.825 --> 13:06.355
with very young children just starting with their names,

13:06.655 --> 13:08.355
the thing they know the best of all.

13:09.295 --> 13:13.675
Um, so it's very possible to do this work, looking at all

13:13.675 --> 13:17.155
of those threads, doing them simultaneously,

13:18.055 --> 13:21.235
and not waiting until the kids have got all their sounds in

13:21.235 --> 13:26.075
place before we move on to doing the prefixes and suffixes

13:26.495 --> 13:29.995
or before we go on to looking at where words come from.

13:30.145 --> 13:32.675
Because if we do that, then there's a whole lot of kids

13:32.675 --> 13:34.235
who will be waiting a lot of years

13:34.295 --> 13:37.075
before they get into this very interesting exploration

13:37.695 --> 13:41.475
and explanation of why we spell the words we do

13:42.015 --> 13:42.675
the way we do.

00:00 - I think the general public might just think that good spelling is getting all the letters in the right order so that people don't n****r when you make a spelling mistake. But good spelling's more than that, good spelling is indicative of,

00:13 - good reading comprehension. Good spelling is indicative of good writing. So it's not just about making sure that people don't make fun of you. it really is strongly connected to being able to read and write well as well. So I, I think that people have this idea that spelling is as simple as putting all the letters in the right order because that's what they've learned at school. We tend to reward letters in the right order with the tick

00:39 - and letters in the wrong order with the cross. we don't really, teach spelling. We do that kind of testing. Did you get all the letters in the right order? And it's such a simplistic way of understanding what spelling is. we think about it, spelling is really trying to communicate meaning to a reader. That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to represent a little meaningful thing like a

01:03 - word, and put it down on a piece of paper and have a reader understand it. And for them to understand, we have to all agree that it must be spelled in a particular way. So spelling is a representation of meaning rather than just this random exercise in trying to put letters in a particular order. So I think that really, it's bad spelling instruction that we're more interested in, and that instruction is instruction

01:31 - that doesn't focus on meaning in spelling. And instead just says, I'm gonna give you 10 words to go home and learn off by heart, and on Friday I want you to write them. And there's never really been any instruction around those words. And very often the kids don't even know what those words mean. Nobody seems interested in that. They've just been given a list

01:53 - of words to go home and learn. So good instruction would start with this kind of linguistic understanding that a word is a representation of meaning. Now we think of that little meaning as a, as a canvas. So I'm gonna take a word as an example, right? So beautiful. Now, beautiful. That little canvas word, has a meaning of being pleasing to my eye or pleasing to my senses. But how do you spell that word? Like if I wanna write that word down

02:24 - and communicate it to somebody else, I have to think, how will I represent that meaning on a piece of paper? And that's what spelling is, right? How do I represent the meaning on a piece of paper? And to represent that meaning, you need to bring a whole lot of linguistic skills to the party. You can't just think, what, what sounds can I hear? because that won't help you spell beautiful as it turns out. In fact, just listening for the sounds you can hear,

02:52 - won't help you spell most words in English. So you really need more than what words can I Hear? So we need, more knowledge, more linguistic knowledge in order to spell. So sounds are important and we call that phenology. But other things are important as well. Morphology are the meaning parts of words. So I'm gonna take that beautiful little canvas of beautiful, and we'll think about the morphology of beautiful.

03:23 - So morphology, it just means the morphemes in the word and morphemes are the meaningful parts of the word. So beautiful has two meaningful parts, beauty and full. but you can see I can't, I can't make sense of those morphemes if I don't already know what the word means means. So that's why meaning is our little start in canvas. And then this morphology is a, is a thread that runs through the canvas to help us spell. But just knowing the beautiful is made of beauty

03:53 - and full, these two morphines is insufficient to know how to spell it. I still have to figure out, but how do you spell beauty? I can hear this u in beauty, but apparently I'm gonna have to use an EAU pattern to spell that U sound. So now we're getting into the orthography of English. So what are the letter patterns that I will use for the sounds that I can hear?

04:24 - And English is not a phonetic language. So we don't have one letter pattern for every sound we hear. We have a range of letter patterns for every sound you hear for vowel sounds and you is one of our many vowel sounds. We can have up to 20 letter patterns. So that's a big choice, right? You can't just listen for the sound because which of those 20 would you write down as a representation of the sound? So that brings in etymology.

04:57 - So that's another one of our beautiful little linguistic threads that runs through the canvas. And in the canvas of our word, beautiful, we get, a French origin of that word. And that French origin of the word explains why we have an EAU because that's a French letter pattern. It's a French spelling pattern. So that tells us that, hang on.

05:23 - Are you saying that English has words from other languages? English doesn't just have words from other languages. English is made from other languages. It's actually in its DNA that it began as a German language. by the time of the, those Norman, conquest, the William the Conqueror, it became a French German hybrid language. And then during the Renaissance, it had a huge influx of Greek and Latin words. And so really if you wanted to unpack the DNA of English,

06:00 - it would be French, German, Latin, and Greek. And then after the 16 hundreds, just imported many, many words from other, languages from countries that England was conquering or trading with. And so we have a beautiful kind of polygon language. So when we're looking at that canvas of that original word, beautiful, one of those threads running through one of those etymological threads is an exploration of, so when did this word come into our language and where did it come from?

06:34 - Because that's probably gonna give us some clues on which letter patterns we are going to write for the sounds that we can hear. So we can hear in that little canvas that we've got for the word beautiful. We've got some, morphology running through the thread, through the canvas, the thread of morphology, the beauty and the full. We've got some etymology running through there, the French origin of that word beauty to explain that

07:02 - orthographical phenomena of the EAU, which all goes back to, so that's the sound I can hear. So all of those threads run together through that canvas, that base canvas of meaning. And if you want to be a good speller or you want to be a good instructor of spelling, you really have to ensure that all of those are being covered off with the kids that you're teaching. If you're deciding that you'd like

07:29 - to do this spelling better, because basically spelling is not an innate skill. It's actually a human construction. We can hear by that complicated history that we've got that it's a, it's a human invention spelling, to try and solve this problem. How do you communicate meanings to other people through writing? And so if it's a human invention, then it needs human instruction.

07:54 - There's actually not a place in the brain that was sitting there, just waiting for the spelling to happen. There's not a spelling gene in us. Like we might have a red hair gene or a blue eye gene. so it's a, it's a taught skill. It's a learned skill, therefore it's a taught skill. so what, what would it mean to teach in this way? Well, essentially it means that those wonderful threads that run through the canvas become your guide for teaching.

08:23 - I think currently people, might be thinking, well, I do remember doing a bit of, Greek etymology around suffix when I was in, high school. And I think that's the mistake we make with spelling instruction. We kind of leave the important parts for spelling instruction to too late in the process. And often we leave it to kids who are doing advanced studies.

08:52 - they'll be the ones who can cope with the Latin roots or the Greek prefixes. But actually all kids from the very beginning need to be told honestly how English spelling works. So even in our, without our students who's starting in the very beginning of school, five year olds coming into school can understand the notion that words are, are made of meaning parts. For example, if we were teaching them to write,

09:22 - the word jumped, as in I jumped on the trampoline. Then if we just said to them, write down the letters, you can hear what sounds can you hear, then I can guarantee you that they will write AT on the end of jumped and they will not put a in. So they're very likely to write JUMT, because that's the sounds they can hear now. So clearly they need to be let in on the secret that,

09:58 - English isn't just about the sounds. You can hear the sounds are very important, but they're not enough to spell correctly. So we can tell very young children, we can tell five U holds that jumped is made of two parts, and that's us talking to them about the morphines of words. And we can say, jump is made of JUMP that says jump. Let's all get up a jump kids. And then we can say, but on the end of it, it has Ed because Ed tells us that it happened before.

10:36 - So now I jump, but yesterday I jumped. So even though we can hear it's ed, because Ed is the morphine, it's the suffix that tells us that it happened in the past. Now that's for a five-year-old, that's very comprehensible. And I know it's comprehensible because five-year-olds come into their first year of school already using ed because they say, I see you yesterday. I go to the beach with mom and dad.

11:12 - So they already know intuitively that Ed is a suffix that marks the past because you can hear it in their speech. What they don't know yet is that it doesn't always go on the end of a verb to mark the past, but they know it. So it's easy to teach them. So that's a good example of how you go about it with very young children. And you can do etymology with very young children. So that word origin material doesn't have to be done with your advanced kids who are in,

11:45 - you know, secondary school. It can be done with very young children as well. And the place to start is the etymology of their names. Where do their names come from? And that's when you find out that Chris, whose name has a cut at the beginning but is written with ACH, we find out that, Chris, I think your name has come from Greek. Because our Greek origin words have a ch that says like Christmas and chemist.

12:21 - And then Charlotte can put up her hand and say, I have C. And then we can say, but Charlotte, your C makes the sound of sh. And that's because Charlotte, your name comes from French. And our ch words that make a sh sound have come to us from French like chef and chandelier and chauffeur and chateau. All the posh words have come from the French. So that's the kind of very fun and accessible exploration that you can do

13:02 - with very young children just starting with their names, the thing they know the best of all. so it's very possible to do this work, looking at all of those threads, doing them simultaneously, and not waiting until the kids have got all their sounds in place before we move on to doing the prefixes and suffixes or before we go on to looking at where words come from. Because if we do that, then there's a whole lot of kids who will be waiting a lot of years before they get into this very interesting exploration

13:37 - and explanation of why we spell the words we do the way we do.

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