Correcting spelling mistakes in schools

[Titbits]

Please help...I have started an epetition on the governments website.
My local primary school tells me that they don't correct all my children's spelling mistakes because too much red pen is discouraging! Surely it would be better to focus on ENcouraging them to spell correctly...and making them feel proud of their work?
Ofsted are actively promoting this approach even though friends in further education and the business world tell me that they throw away any applications from students with poor spelling.
It seems that in secondary school, spelling errors aren't corrected at all.
Call me old fashioned (!) but copying out a spelling mistake three times at the bottom of the page was how I improved my spelling. Weekly spelling tests seem irrelevant if the children then aren't taught to use the correct spelling in a body of text.

Hope you will help..enough names will mean it's discussed in Parliament. Link below:

epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/10821

[mrz]

That should be ITA not ITS

[mrz]

The Initial Teaching Alphabet was invented by the grandson of the man who invented Pitman Shorthand to simplify spelling (think Mashabell) and was a spectacular failure. Children were introduced to the simplified system (all books were written using this code rather than English) and then expected to make the transition from ITS "shorthand" (there are 42 letters - 24 letters of the alphabet plus 18 additional symbols) to English spellings.

[edam]

Ah, I see MrsZ, that makes sense.

I had a friend in high school who had been unfortunate enough to be taught some fashionable way of learning to write in infants - the initial teaching alphabet IIRC. Left her seriously confused about spelling, poor girl. And her mother was a teacher - even her mother's input couldn't undo the damage.

[Tortu]

Ha ha, Purits you are quite correct. It is not a time-saving device. Time is not really the issue with marking, it's more than you feel that it is a waste of time e.g. I'm on MN now to avoid marking. I've got a set of A-level essays (20) which I am liberally sprinkling with red pen. They are works of great beauty......but I know students will simply look at the grade at the bottom. They'll take me almost 2 hours to mark, but will that be 2 hours of benefit to the students? Nope. One of the students may glance at the comments to see what they could do to improve, but the rest won't give it a thought.

So why am I doing it?

1. Expectations. Everybody expects to see red pen on work.
   
2. Blind hope that they'll keep the essays and glance back at them the night before the exam, so that it might prove useful to them then.
   
3. Laziness. I really should have set up the Self-assessment/ peer-assessment thing- but it definitely takes a lot of work on my part. At the moment just putting loads of red pen on the essays seems like an easier option.
   

I would definitely be spending the time better if I prepared a general lesson on how to use paragraphs properly at A-level- that would boost all their grades. But, meh, marking instead.

[teacherwith2kids]

Moondog, I think that if, indeed, teachers never corrected spelling 'because it discourages creativity' that would indeed be lying to children.

However, we don't, and certainly not for that reason. There are SOME occasions on which we do not focus on spelling - because our learning objective for the day is about paragraphs, story structure, grammar, extending vocabulary, speech punctuation or whatever. These occasions are balanced, day by day and week by week, by occasions on which the focus is absolutely on correct spelling - and on those occasions we may look back through earlier work to find examples of the spelling rule we are working on, and how we have now learned more and can now spell those words correctly.

Think of when you last learned something new - could you focus on everything at once? Or did you and the person who was teaching you focus on one aspect at a time until you were sufficiently confident to bring several aspects together at once?

[mrz]

I would suggest gorionine she has only been half taught phonics.

Making a phonetically plausible attempt using the knowledge the child has at that point is fine for very young children. If you are 4 or 5 and only know "f" spelling elephant as elefant is a stage but the next step is to teach the child that /f/ can be written in other ways and in elephant it is written "ph". It's expectations for stages of learning. Personally I would be happy with elefant" in reception and Y1 but would be looking for elephant^ from Y2 (rough example as it depends entirely on the individual child some I would expect earlier and others will be later)

[moondog]

'The thing that bothers me about the 'correcting spellings discourages creativity' argument is that it's effectively lying to children. It's hiding information from them.'

That's exactly it, Edam.

[gorionine]

mrz, she was but she cannot spell correctly. Phonetically it all makes sense but it still is not the correct spelling. DS2 is doing ok and DS3 is a catastrophy because he does not care if no one gets what he writes so long as it looks nice (he used to spell "after" correctly but when he learnt that PH makes the sounfd F as well, he decided that "aphter" is a much nicer word. Nothing I said so far changed his mind.

[mrz]

edam the way we work (many other primary schools will work in similar ways ) if the focus of the work is spelling or grammar then these will be marked. If however, the child is asked to produce a piece of extended writing in 20 minutes the initial focus may be on the content, so spelling and grammar won't be marked. BUT this draft piece will be edited by the child, to improve and extend, at which stage they will be looking at their own spelling and grammar before producing a final piece which will be quality marked for spelling, grammar, presentation and content.

[Feenie]

Oh fgs!

Children leave our school able to spell, I can assure you. Concentrating on spellings at appropriate times lessens the errors eventually and makes sure of that.

[edam]

Well, there's an 'a' instead of 'I' and a missing 's' in your post... OK, it's the law of sod that any time you post about spelling, you are bound to make a mistake, have done it myself (and I write for a living).

So, if you have to leave some spellings uncorrected because it would discourage children to correct them all, how do you ensure they leave school able to spell?

[Feenie]

But a child is unlikely to use that calculation unless it's intrinsic to the working out - therefore, yes, they need to know that they've made an error as part of what is being taught right at that moment.

You won't find a bigger stickler for spelling than me on MN (apart from Goblin, perhaps ), but even as a stickler with a huge bugbear, I know from years of experience that a page full of corrected spellings does not help a child, other than to a) make them not pay attention to anything a write on their work - there are so many things, it's all a blur, so why bother? and b)make them not bother next time.

I correct spellings I feel they should know in Y5, either because they are in common usage, or because we have specifically worked on a rule. I don't let things slide. But to poster on this thread, it may still seem as if I overlook too many.

[edam]

I mean, I've never heard a maths teacher claim that you shouldn't correct 2 + 2 = 6 because it will somehow turn them off maths.

[edam]

That's fascinating, Tortu, and sounds very effective.

The thing that bothers me about the 'correcting spellings discourages creativity' argument is that it's effectively lying to children. It's hiding information from them. How are they supposed to know that enough is not spelt enuff if no-one has corrected the mistake? Lying by omission perhaps, but still misleading them. Which will create huge problems once they leave school and have to try to get a job/fill in forms/use written language in any way, shape or form.

I really can't see how misleading children helps them. Seems to me it hobbles them. Maybe they need two sets of marks for each piece of work, one for spelling and grammar, one for expression?

[Feenie]

The point is not to mark it more quickly, though, purits - as you say, it can be more time consuming - but to find a way which is of more value to the pupil. We do this occasionally in upper KS2. As Tortu says, how can they attain the highest level, without knowing exactly which skills are involved in attaining the highest mark?

[purits]

We have now gone from:
teacher marking homework, which we don't like to do because it's very time consuming, to:
teacher checking to see if pupil self-assessment is correct i.e. teacher has to look at the work and assess it (which teacher was doing anyway in scenario A) and then compare the pupil-assessment to the teacher-assessment, to make sure that pupil is doing it right. Isn't that more work for the teacher?

[Tortu]

Purits, it sounds more complicated than it is and there are several different ways in which you can do it, but essentially you are talking about good teaching (NB loads of red pen on work is NOT considered good teaching):

1. Criterion-driven. This is essentially the way in which the teacher would mark it and works best when students are aiming towards a particular exam- say English Language GCSE. You simplify the relevant set of assessment criteria into child-friendly language, so that the child knows what you are looking for when you mark their work. The child then examines their own work and decides what level they would award it, based on the assessment criteria they've been given. This has many benefits: students understand exactly what they have to do in order to improve their grade; by examining their own work closely they are also analysing it; and they are more closely involved in their own learning. My own experience of this is that students are initially much harsher on themselves than I would have been, but very quickly go on to be extremely realistic and accurate. I use this a lot at GCSE and genuinely find it raises standards: if a student knows exactly what to do in order to get an A, they're going to do it, aren't they?
   
2. Student-driven. There is an argument that nobody knows what they were trying to achieve better than the student themselves, so who better to set the target? This one takes a lot of work and structure, so I often find it can take up to a term to set up properly but, again, it gives a student a high level of involvement in their own learning. They are AMAZINGLY honest and good at setting targets. I tend to use this mainly at KS3 and would, quite simply, get the students to go through their own work and set themselves some targets for what they reckon they need to do in order to improve their next piece of work based on the one they've just marked. I'm afraid, that this is where you tend to find that students actually are really good at assessing themselves. The majority of spelling mistakes do not come as a surprise to the students, but are as a result of 'getting the homework done quickly before neighbours' or 'I know this is wrong but I can't be bothered to look in the dictionary'. Getting them to go through and underline the words which they think are spelt incorrectly can be quite revealing. For the younger students I often have a list of suggested targets they might want to choose from and one of the most popular is 'use a dictionary to check my spellings'
   

Overall, self-assessment gives the students ownership of their own learning. They take responsibility for and are part of the assessment progress and it takes away the mysterious nature of assessment. They are much better able to set realistic targets for themselves and understand what they actually need to do in order to achieve.


But have to echo others and say that it would obviously only work if students are still taught the spelling/ grammer rules regularly (which they are).

[mrz]

gorionine was your daughter not taught phonics in primary school?

[gorionine]

the "nor" should be a "not" and you can take away which ever "know" you want away.

[gorionine]

I signed as someone whose English spelling is really bad (not my first language). My Dcs are very bright but their spelling is atrocious and I think it takes the shine away from their hard work when it is riddled with spelling mistakes. Also I have noticed since D1 started High School that they expect them to know magically know how to spell things when there was absolutely no emphasis on spelling in primary school. You cannot on one side nor correct them and on the other expect that at some point they will miraculously know how to spell because the school building has changed.

On a more personal note, I think writing is like a code you use to communicate information, if the code is not the same for all, it is open road for mistakes

[mrz]

That certainly isn't my experience Katisha. Every class in my school teaches spelling at an appropriate level for the children's age/stage.
We start in reception with daily Grammar, Handwriting, Spelling and Punctuation instruction.

[purits]

Can you explain about self-assessment, Tortu. How does a pupil develop this insight and how does it apply to spelling? If the child cannot spell in the first place, does not realise that it is spelling incorrectly (because if they knew, they wouldn't do it) and the teacher does not pick them up on it then how does this self-assessment and self-knowledge arise?

[Katisha]

I agree there mrz.

But I do detect an undercurrent that people don't think it matters so much these days.

And while current education techniques are no doubt way more encouraging, at some point, perhaps at secondary level, I think there needs to be some sort of concerted drive to tighten up the basics, even at the risk of being boring...

But by then teachers say they want to concentrate on content not style, so it kind of becomes nobody's main concern.

[mrz]

What people are trying to saying ..................

[mrz]

No one is saying spelling doesn't matter. What people are trying to saying is the OPs petition is very flawed.