My fairly bright 9 year old DD just can't spell

[amidaiwish]

She's pretty good at maths, a great reader, a lovely creative writer but just can't spell. She got all level 3's in her yr2 SATS and is doing well in school yr4.
but her spelling is atrocious. i have emailed her teacher this morning to talk to the special needs team to see if they can assess/help her. (tbh i am not hopeful, dd will be a long way down their list of priorities)

a year or so ago someone linked to a website where you could buy a book for about £25 which was to help kids who can't spell, i can't find the link, does it ring a bell with anyone.

Thanks all, will let you know how we get on. V interesting website mrz thanks

Mrz: need to ask yourself why you consider English so difficult
As a language, English is very easy, Mrz.
Probably the easiest in the world - thanks to the peasants who shore it of nearly all grammatical complexity during the 3 centuries of Norman rule (1066 to roughly 1350) when the upper classes switched to French and stopped using English almost completely. This gave the lower classes a chance to tidy it up, DOING AWAY WITH much silly stuff like i
thinkE, thou thinkEST, we thinkEN, they thinkEN...
that still encumbers other languages.

But English spelling is beastly. And with my detailed analysis of the 7,000 most used English words, i have established exactly how bad it is: 4,219 of the 7,000 contain one or more unpredictably used letters.

It's the need for so much word by word memorisation of variable spellings (need/lead, to/two/too, why/wine, you/use, consider/concise, in/English, so/toe ...) that makes learning to spell English difficult and exceptionally time-consuming.

Even French, the next worst to spell European language, has less than 1,000 words with tricky spellings, and most of those are a bit like 'definite'. - There is some logical way of working out what's right, instead of just having to remember, as with most irregular English spellings.

I thought we were discussing spelling Masha so the question would be about what you find difficult with spelling

what you find difficult with spelling
I have explained before that i found learning to spell English relatively easy, just like my daughter, in complete contrast to my son and husband.
I found it much harder than Lithuanian, Russian or German, but when i came to England i quickly realised that my spelling was much better than most people's. I was lucky to be born with a good visual memory.

But my experience aside, it's a well-established fact that learning to spell English is much harder and takes much longer than other European languages, and as was confirmed by the Seymour et al cross-European study of 2003.

What i have done is establish exactly why that is: how much there is to learn and what the worst problems are. That's what my work over the past 20 years has been about.

I know you have moaned many times that English has words that are sound the same but have different spellings ... Try looking at meaning Masha!

The 335 English words which have different spellings for different meanings (heterographs), such as 'there/their, two/to/too' are among the main reasons why learning to spell English is so time-consuming.

It's impossible to learn them by the phonic method. They are one of the hardest things for young children. And none of them serve any useful purpose whatsoever. They merely make learning to write English harder, thanks to Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755.

The 2,000+ English homophones which have just one spelling for their different meanings, such as 'mean, lean, bar, bank, sound, ground' never cause the slightest problems in speech or in written texts.

Johnson did many really stupid things to English spelling. E.g. he messed up the English long and short vowel spelling system (late, latter, bite, bitter) by excepting many words of Latin origin from the English system (ditty - pity, silly - lily).
Creating hundreds of pointless heterographs was his worst offence.

I blame phonics. Actually, I blame phonics for lots of things .

Ds1 (8)'s school don't correct either and it drives me mad. I sort of get the point when they are 5 or 6 that you don't want to discourage them, but at what point do you just have to say, look, you should really know how to spell "Christmas" in DECEMBER WHEN IT'S WRITTEN ALL AROUND YOU!!!

They should be able to spell Christmas and Christopher and chrysalis and chrome using phonics ... ch is an alternative way to spell the sound /k/ (Greek root)

i can't blame phonics
un der est im ate

if she was good at phonics she should spell that with ease!

interestingly dh said he can't read phonetically, he just reads each word visually as a whole word, when he did science A level he never could read the long latin words, only once he had heard it did he remember it. so it is all his fault!!! i did Italian GCSE, definitely need to use syllables/phonics for that one.

Bit confused about why this has turned into an argument

My 9yo DD is dyslexic and struggles to spell chair, house, etc :( Sounds like your dd is doing fine to me.

Have always thought the english language is pretty illogical tbh

argument?

They should be able to spell Christmas and Christopher and chrysalis and chrome using phonics ... ch is an alternative way to spell the sound /k/ (Greek root)

But you can only do it once you know. You can work backwards from knowing how it is spelt, to see how the spelling of the sounds in those words works out, but if you couldn't remember seeing those words written down before, chances are you would get them wrong.

Maybe Caitlin isn't blaming phonics per se, but the teacher encouraging children to spell words as they sound with no further instruction, input or correction. While no-one wants to see their work clarted with red pen, maybe the teacher should provide the correct spelling of a few of the mis-spelt words at the end of a piece of work.

It is also strange that OP's DD's teacher doesn't correct the easier words she uses in her work but expects her to learn these longer words for a test. Actually those words are quite straightforward for those who understand adding prefixes and suffixes to root words. Do you know if that was covered in class, OP, or were the words just given out randomly to learn for the test?

Obviously they need to be taught ... That's phonics!

For many years teachers have been told not to correct spellings (very much part of whole language/mixed methods teaching in the 60-90s) as it would upset children/stunt creativity ... Which is utter madness as the more often you see a word written incorrectly the more that becomes the norm.

Ds1 often spells things wrongly, yet phonetically they are correct. That is my issue with phonics. He has spelt "pies" as "pighs" before now - to go with sighs, high, etc. And as for Christmas - like cecily said, it's all very well going backwards and showing other examples of "ch" being pronounced as "k", but it's knowing WHEN it should be "c", when it is "k", when it is "ch" etc. Anyway, I don't want to hijack this thread into a bitch about phonics (although I could go on) - but I totally agree with others that half the problem here is teachers not correcting, or doing so inconsistently.

Phonic spelling is an improvement on how I used to spell - it was so bad I struggle to use dictionaries to help me (- spell checkers were coming in as well but again my spelling was so bad they were of limited use). This was another common suggestion to deal with my spelling - and one they are using with DD1 - which isn't helping her writing speed another area of concern now apparently.

I was lucky my parents had an encyclopaedic dictionary - so I'd go through as far as I know the starting letters of a word and read down till I found the one I needed - I learnt quite a bit on doing that though not how to spell.

Another suggestion was reading lots - which I did - and again had benefits but didn't help with spelling. So seeing word spelt correctly didn't help me spell - I don't think that's uncommon.

So yes it is a bit disconcerting when one DC write I hait my sister but at least I can explain they want the a-e sound not the ai one and they understand what I mean.

However while phonics and word building are very important skills - I think ultimately it is down to practise to know which group of letters that can make that sound to use. Which does mean writing it correctly again and again.

So years of incorrect writing and not correcting mistakes is a huge problem IMO.

I really wish I started apples and pear earlier with DD1 - I'm doing it with the younger one who also starting to show problems and they are getting through quicker - I can see light bulbs going off with them the middle one is working with pre and suffixes and it's making a huge difference - I think it is mainly as they have less years of wrong spelling then DD1 to over come.

Why aren't you correcting his phonic ally plausible attempts Caitlin? Say well done that is a way to spell that sound but in this word it is spelt this way ... and get him to write it correctly.

caitlinohara:
half the problem here is teachers not correcting, or doing so inconsistently.

But deciding how much to correct is not so easy.
It's easy with naturally good spellers who make very few mistakes. Then u just correct all mistakes.

It's much trickier with weaker spellers. They are often put off writing more than a line or two if every piece of writing they get back has lots of corrections on it. But the less children write, the poorer their chances of learning to spell.

Moreover, back in the good or bad old days, depending on your point of view, when teachers used to be quite obsessed with spelling and corrected everything, the number of school leavers with bad spelling was much the same as now, because the number of words with irregular spellings has not changed.

It's much easier to support the child to correct every incorrectly spelt word

Obviously they need to be taught ... That's phonics!

But once you have been taught how to spell specific words, you are using memory, rather than phonics, to spell the word; although I will grant that phonics is an aid to memory.

Another suggestion was reading lots - which I did - and again had benefits but didn't help with spelling. So seeing word spelt correctly didn't help me spell - I don't think that's uncommon.

It is actually a really lame suggestion, Dazzle, though one that gets repeated regularly. I suppose with very young children they will mis-spell words because they have never seen them written down before, but beyond that level doing more and more reading really isn't going to help.

I think for teachers it must be a balancing act between wanting children to have a go and wanting them to get it right. Though I think masha is right that there are plenty of poor spellers of my age and yet in those teachers corrected everything and we also did an inordinate amount of copying off the blackboard.

It's much easier to support the child to correct every incorrectly spelt word

Not sure what you mean by that, mrz

For any of you who want to discover more about Phonics, and various permutations of sounds, try this:

An inexpensive and easy to use book, that can encourage children with reading, spelling and writing, and really help them to understand Phonics, is reviewed in the MN Book Reviews section. Just search ‘Phonics’.

I mean if your child spells what as wot praise the effort great those are the sounds in what but can you remember another way to spell the /w/ sound? ( if they can great if not simply tell them) and can you remember how the /o/ sound is sometimes spelt after a /w/ sound? Then get your child to correct their own errors so they are always seeing the correct spelling.