Georgia is a lively, spontaneous and friendly 10-year- old student entering the fifth grade. Cognitive testing placed her between the average to above average range for most of the domains assessed.
Spelling and writing were a different story for her.
Here are some of Georgia’s spelling errors and samples of sentences she wrote to a prompt:
- cook/cooke
- reach/reche
- circle/courkel
- ruin/rowen
- watch/wauch
- explain/espan
- I whish for my best fierd to live with Me.
- I whish to get a nother dog.
- I love to do hoars backrinding camp and playing with firendes.
In this era of increased involvement with artificial intelligence and other technologies, the question I ask relative to spelling and writing samples like Georgia’s is, does it matter? Does it matter that she can’t spell or barely write a sentence.
It is my sense spelling and writing issues do not seem to be ringing too many bells of concern at the school level.
Perhaps it’s generational.
To a young teacher in their 20’s or so, something like spelling and being able to write sentences may be old school, so yesterday, something that can be easily remedied.
Why spend time on something like spelling when autocorrect is right there? Why bother worrying about complete sentences, when “Grammarly” is your technology assistant, cleaning up your sentence fragments, run-ons and punctuation.
What’s your opinion? Does it matter?
(****This post is dedicated to the memory of Stanley Sterenberg, a dear friend and devoted reader (and commenter) to this blog since the first one was written over 12 years ago. May his memory be a blessing. You will be missed my friend.)
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Copyright, Richard Selznick, Ph.D. 2023, www.shutdownlearner.com.
Looking even beyond the value of writing.. we would still need to be able to read, and we can’t read accurately without knowing how to spell.
No argument from me! I will comment more about this in the next blog. Thanks for commenting and following.
I feel as though spelling does matter. I think the correlation between reading and spelling is significant. I believe that I became a better speller because I read so much. However I do think that the English language is so hard to spell because every word has multiple spelling. My kid would call me a boomer because I believe spelling is important but maybe that’s because it was so significant in my schooling.
Nicole:
As a fellow boomer I’m with you. I hope to comment more on this in the next blog. Thanks for commenting.
Is there a “right” answer to this question? In my very non-expert opinion it absolutely matters! My son basically does the same thing as the samples you gave, and it pains me to read it. Often he can’t even tell me what he has written. Whether it’s a valid assumption or not, people think people who write like that have low IQ, are stupid or uneducated, etc.
What is your professional opinion, Dr. Selznick?
Hi Lisa:
I don’t think there is one “right” answer, but there will be lots of perspectives and opinions, much of which are based on generational attitudes.
I hope to share my professional opinion in the blog coming up – but first I have to write it!!!
Thanks for your comment. Much appreciated.