How Our Kidz Spel: What’s the Big Deel?

How do you spell failure?

The citizens of Middletown, an agricultural community 60 miles north of San Francisco, feared that the answer was on the letters page of their local newspaper.

There they found more than two dozen letters from eighth-graders furious about an outbreak of vandalism at their school. Departing from its usual practice, the newspaper ran the letters exactly as they had been written. It didn’t take long to figure out why.

For starters, the 25 students spelled “vandal” in nearly as many ways. “Dear Vandales,” went one letter, “I really think that you were stuped to mess our classrooms. . . . Our teachers our upseat and so are the students. I think you should rote in ----.”

Or, “Dear Vanduls, I hope your happy now that you just cost us thosands of dollars and ruind are new computers. . . .”

Others got “vandals” right but not much else. “We just got are new cumperters,” said one. “Yor relly dameg are thing.” Scolded another, “I am verey mad at you and it herts to see my teacher’s cry. Ther is know punishment that can fix whate hapend.”

Du we hav a prbloem hear?

We soitenly do--and not only in Middletown. Swept up in a wave of new thinking about how to teach reading and writing, elementary schools throughout the state largely abandoned spelling instruction 10 years ago. And, as California went whole hog for “whole language”--the theory that language skills should come naturally, by absorbing good literature--so went the nation.

Sales of spelling books began to plummet, and workshops on nurturing creativity in young writers flourished. Teachers encouraged 5- and 6-year-olds to spell words the way they sounded--”I’m gowing to lern the hulla in Huwyyee”--so as not to impede the flow of ideas.

Mistakes weren’t instantly circled in red but were praised as examples of “invented,” “engineered,” “created” or “constructed” spelling--the idea being that students should not be made slaves to dictionaries until about the fourth grade. Report cards reflected the new emphasis, like the one in Houston’s public schools that grades students’ use of “spelling that can be understood.” All over, parents perturbed by funny-looking words were being told, basically, to chill out.

Now, says spelling researcher J. Richard Gentry, author of “Spel . . . Is a Four-Letter Word,” “We have a whole generation of children who are really poor spellers.”

Nearly every parent of a school-age child has a horror story to tell about assignments that come home with misspellings uncorrected, or words fumbled on the blackboard--by the teacher.

For Larry Allen, a Temecula chiropractor, the moment of reckoning came when his fifth-grade daughter got an A on an anatomy test despite 16 botched words.

“That’s what threw me over the edge,” said Allen, who stormed down to the next school board meeting to complain.

Soon after, a daughter in kindergarten brought home a letter from the teacher urging parents not to correct “creative” spelling. The teacher tried to calm him down, Allen said, “but that just made me madder.”

Like phonics, spelling has become political, a piston in the engine that drives the conservative critique of education. No less than Bob Dole, on the presidential stump last fall, harpooned invented spelling. “You just spell the words any way you see fit!” he exclaimed, getting a rise out of a Minnesota audience. That was after he lambasted educators for killing off spelling bees because they feared the losers would lose self-esteem.

Dole was defending a uniquely American tradition that just turned 70. Today, after conquering the likes of “crinoline” and “borzoi,” one of 247 sweaty-palmed youngsters will be crowned the winner of the National Spelling Bee in Washington. But, affirming that Dole’s speech was more than rhetoric, Springfield, Mass., earlier this month canceled its local spelling tournament on the grounds it had become too stressful for children. John Silber, the outspoken former president of Boston University who heads Massachusetts’ board of education, lamented this as evidence of “the whining ‘90s.”

Town Shocked by Rampant Errors

Today, such rants fill America’s living rooms, along with complaints about the corrosive influence of television and calculators in math classes. What are our schools up to, the rant goes, if not even spelling matters anymore?

Indeed, when the Middletown student letters were published in October 1994, they set off a war that waged for weeks in the local papers, with some residents seizing on the misspellings as proof of the inferiority of public schools. A few did contend that spelling wasn’t so important in this age of computer spell-checks. But, for the most part, community members were shocked by the rampant errors.

Admittedly, the students made themselves an easy target. Spelling has been likened to brain surgery: It has to be perfect. “A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying,” social critic Thorstein Veblen observed in his 1899 “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” Poor spelling, then as now, was as conspicuous as a rip in the britches, a mark of the unrefined.

H.D. Hoover, a University of Iowa professor who has long tracked educational dips and climbs, is more blunt: “People can be proud of being bad in math and explain it away. But if you misspell words, people think you’re stupid.”

Bad spelling can also be costly. A restaurateur sought tutoring from a West Los Angeles clinic because he couldn’t take telephone orders without mangling the names of menu items beyond recognition. At Pacific Bell, where spelling is an essential skill for a legion of operators and clerical workers, literacy scores of job applicants have been dropping. Recruitment director Eric Mitchell recalls how one applicant misspelled heinous “hunus,” then remarked when she flunked the company’s spelling test, “What’s the big deal?”

The most infamous misspelling in recent history was committed by Dan Quayle when he flubbed “potato” during a 1992 campaign stop at a New Jersey elementary school spelling bee. With news cameras rolling, the then-vice president insisted that the humble vegetable was spelled “P-O-T-A-T-O-E.”

A 1989 Gallup survey suggested that Quayle had plenty of company. Adults in the U.S. missed eight of 10 words, from “sandwich” to “penitentiary,” in Gallup’s international bee. In the running against Australia, Britain and Canada, we finished last.

There is evidence we have gotten even worse since then.

On the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, one of the nation’s oldest and most widely used set of standardized exams, elementary school spelling scores rose from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. But the scores have been dropping since 1990.

Hoover, one of the tests’ authors, bases his finding on Iowa’s fourth- through eighth-graders, a stable pool he says mirrors the performance of students nationwide.

In California, too, the news is bad: Spelling scores for the second through 10th grades are markedly lower than those for reading, writing and math, according to a review of 1995-96 standardized test results from 1.7 million students.

Experts say too much TV and too little reading are part of the problem. But Hoover says the answer may be simpler than that: U.S. schools simply aren’t spending enough time teaching the wretched subject.

In California, the culprit was “holistic teaching,” which started coming into vogue in the late 1980s. Proponents said the reason achievement was low was that learning was chopped up into too many disconnected parts. You couldn’t write until you could spell. You couldn’t spell until you learned the sounds of the alphabet. You couldn’t write a sentence until you knew your verbs from your nouns.

Whole language said you don’t need to know the parts first. Just plunge in.

Adherents frowned on the random lists of spelling words handed out weekly in elementary schools. Students would get the words on Monday and a test on Friday. As critics saw it, the kids then quickly forgot the words.

The solution? Drop books that encouraged breaking language down into its parts--grammar books, Dick-and-Jane readers, spelling books. Order up textbooks rich in children’s literature. Link the teaching of spelling, reading and grammar through stories and writing, lots of writing.

In 1989, that’s what California’s Board of Education did. Spelling and grammar books were essentially banned from the list of approved texts that districts could buy with state funds.

Of course, many teachers ignored the latest dogma. Bennett-Kew Elementary School in Inglewood kept buying spelling books with district money, although the materials got harder to find. Today, students there still spend 20 minutes a day pronouncing and copying words, ending the week with the Friday ritual: the test. The effort paid off two weeks ago when Bennett-Kew students nabbed three out of five first-place awards in the district’s spelling bee.

Method Called ‘Huge Mistake’

But in many schools, fixating on spelling came to be seen as an impediment to writing, especially during the tender years of kindergarten and first grade.

“Young writers simply can’t learn to write freely and productively if they’re always confined to words they know they can spell conventionally,” Kenneth Goodman, a leading theorist of the whole language movement, wrote in his 1993 book, “What’s Whole in Whole Language?”

Spelling, the theory went, would be more meaningful and learned more readily in the course of writing a paper about pterodactyls or reading a classic like “The Little Engine That Could.”

It was spelling by osmosis. And, says Bill Honig, who presided over the shift to whole language as California’s superintendent of public instruction from 1982 to 1993, it was a huge mistake.

“I think the attitude among some teachers and some people teaching them was that spelling doesn’t matter,” he said. “The most important thing was getting the ideas down. So you’d see misspellings even in the final draft.”

Critics lay the blame for this laissez-faire attitude on “invented spelling,” a linguistic term coined about 25 years ago. But even revisionists like Honig say that theory has been wrongly maligned, maintaining that the original reevaluation of spelling stemmed from legitimate educational concerns--and not merely fear of holding kids to standards.

Portland State University professor Sandra Wilde, the author of, “You Kan Red This!”, a guide to spelling and punctuation for whole language classrooms, argues that invented spelling is not a euphemism for misspelling or a license, as Dole suggested, to spell werds any ole wa yu wunt.

It is a theory that describes the process of learning to spell correctly, Wilde say. “Invention,” she wrote, “is not a failure to achieve convention but a step on the road to reaching it.”

Take, for example, these sentences written by a first-grader: “Mene peepul cam to mi prte. My mother wor a bootifull dress.”

A traditionalist would immediately correct all the mangled words. But those schooled in invented spelling would be encouraged by this phonetically reasonable approximation of “Many people came to my party. My mother wore a beautiful dress.”

Most first-graders attempt to spell unfamiliar words by ear, using their developing knowledge of letter-sound correspondences. Thus, “prte” is not to be red-slashed away as an example of mental sloth, but celebrated as a sign of learning. It is a good phonetic guess by a young writer applying what she knows so far about language.

‘A Great Diagnostic Tool’

Honig calls invented spelling “a great diagnostic tool” that can help a teacher pinpoint weaknesses and plan lessons to improve reading and spelling. Without allowances for improvisation, kindergarten children “basically can’t write anything,” said the former schools chief. In first grade, he adds, invented spelling tells teachers what stage of language development a student is in.

But after first grade, Honig said, the message should be shouted out: Bad spelling should be corrected.

That, said some experts, is where schools fell down. And it’s the reason many are scrambling now for a remedy.

Just ask Kathy Terrusa, who runs a private tutoring center in Tarzana. On a recent afternoon she was huddled at a desk in one of three small rooms she rents in a Burbank Boulevard office building. A 6-year-old boy named Ryan was hunched beside her. He had made some glaring errors in school that week: “how” came out “hou, “down” came out “doun,” “house” came out “houst” and “around” came out “eoud.”

Terrusa pronounced each word, taking care to enunciate, and made him write each one again. “Awww,” the reluctant speller said, bowing his head on the table as she handed him another blank sheet of paper.

Every weekday afternoon, students from public and private schools in the area pile into Terrusa’s Kumon center for help with math and reading. Kumon, a Japan-based franchised tutoring chain, doesn’t routinely offer spelling help. But she found that so many of her clients needed it--90% of her 120 students--that she added it to her service.

In Terrusa’s view, Ryan and other students are suffering from a lack of phonics instruction and spelling books in public schools. “It’s the absence of materials more than anything else,” she said.

Miles to the south, at Leland Stanford Middle School in Long Beach, the de-emphasis on correct spelling has produced students such as Andrew Gould, a winsome 11-year-old who, at the beginning of sixth grade last fall, was still flubbing words like “puppy,” “sneeze” and “pepper.”

“My spelling was all messed up,” Andrew said recently. “I didn’t like writing. It was like a torture chamber for me.”

Since September, Andrew has been enrolled in a program at Stanford called Auditory Discrimination in Depth. Developed by West Los Angeles reading specialist Sasha Borenstein, it teaches students the sounds of letters and how to pull them apart and put them together. It teaches phonics rules that Borenstein has given amusing names, like the “bossy R” that takes over words such as “stir” and “ever.”

On a recent morning, teacher Cindy Galloway was giving Andrew and two other students nonsense words to practice on. They got a few seconds to view a flashcard with the likes of “twesht” and “ploimd” on it. The students had to visualize the “word,” then pronounce it. That was followed by a spelling test on real words.

Andrew said the training has helped him become a more confident reader and writer. Now he can read Bible passages at home with his family without help. In school, “I can write five pages a period,” he said proudly.

This is not the only way to teach spelling. Other schools around the state have turned to programs emphasizing mastery of “high frequency” words, such as “the,” “more” and “little.”

To Honig, what’s important is that schools offer some organized program of spelling--it’s better than nothing at all.

By abandoning spelling instruction, schools stopped showing children how letters and sounds fit together. If you aren’t skilled at “encoding,” or spelling, you’ll find “decoding,” or reading, even more mysterious, Honig and others maintain.

The truth of that hit home when a 1994 federal survey on reading ranked California’s students at the bottom nationally.

Now, the pendulum is in full swing--back to phonics, back to spelling. The backlash against whole language inspired the Legislature last year to pass a law requiring schools to use phonics and to teach spelling.

Schools, fearful of the political heat, are adapting to the shift. In the Irvine Unified School District, incendiary terms such as invented spelling are getting the heave-ho. A recent bulletin advises teachers to use the term “temporary spelling” instead to describe “the spelling of words that have not yet been studied and mastered.”

Some experts, including Wilde, fear the return of the “bad old days” when children spent half an hour a day copying words from a spelling book. The old spellers often were too easy. A 1980 study found that second-grade students already knew how to spell 68% of the words assigned in their spelling text. That, Wilde suggested, is a big reason why many students found the subject boring.

But spelling books, boring or not, may be coming to Middletown.

In that community, the reason isn’t California’s new back-to-basics mandate--but embarrassment over those letters to the editor.

At Middletown Middle School, students are now assigned 12 new words a week, including homophones like “their” and “there” and more difficult words like “foreign” and “deficiency.”

“We’re not making the assumption that they were learned prior to middle school,” Principal Joanne Rodriguez said of such words.

After the Middletown Times Star published the error-ridden letters, the eighth-graders pelted the paper with more letters, which were angrier than before--but, whew, lots better spelled.

They explained that they had been too upset about the vandalism when they wrote the first letters and hadn’t had time to check their dictionaries. In fact, more than a few of them noted, they wrote the letters while sitting on the gymnasium floor because their classrooms were being dusted for the vandals’ fingerprints.

But community members showed little sympathy. Many of them wrote in to say that good spelling was important. The editors--called “mean,” “rude” and “insensitive” by the students--stood their ground, too.

“We could have edited and corrected the letters prior to publication, but by doing so,” they wrote in an editorial, “a number of us felt we would be guilty of covering up a crime far greater than vandalism.”

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In Defense of Invented Spelling

Critics suggest that “invented spelling” is just an excuse for poor spelling. But spelling experts say an understanding of invented spellings can help a teacher pinpoint specific weaknesses and shape lessons. Here is a sample, with comments from Portland State University expert Sandra Wilde:

EVALUATION: Example by a third-grader named Cheri have six misspellings. The majority are “inappropriate but reasonable” choices in spelling certain sounds, such as “oy” instead of “oi” and “g” instead of “j” in “join.”

CONCLUSION: “Cheri spelled 84% of the 32 words in her piece correctly, so there is no cause for concern. Her invented spellings are somewhat immature for a third grader, but still reflect good thinking about phonics. She should be helped to learn how to use a dictionary and other resources to correct these words when proofreading.”

****

“Someday I would like to join the circus. Do you know what I want to be? I want to be a trapeze lady and my suit would be purple with diamonds.”

1) Compound word error

2) Knows “g” sounds like “j.” Using “y” instead of “j” makes sense, as in “boy.”

3) Many students hear “tr” as “chr.” Or it could reflect an idiosyncrasy in this student’s speech.

4) Phonetic spellings