Children are being held back at school because they are forced to memorise irregular spellings and learn how to use the apostrophe, a leading academic will claim this week.
John Wells, Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College London and president of the Spelling Society, will use the society’s centenary dinner this week to call for a “freeing up” of English spelling.
“In Finnish, once you have learned the letters, you know how to spell, so it would be ludicrous to hold spelling tests. In countries like Italy and Spain it’s similar. But with English it’s not phonetic, and there are just so many irregularities,” he told The Times.
“It seems to be a great pity that English-speaking countries are holding back children in this way.
Professor Wells pointed towards the emerging technologies that are leading to a reevaluation of spelling, saying: “Text messaging, e-mail and internet chat rooms are showing us the way forward for English.”
WOW! And this BS is coming from a professor. All I can say is we have officially failed all future generations to idiocracy.
While I am confident the L.H.C. will not destroy the planet, it might be better that it does if this type of logic keeps being push…
Yet another nut escaped from the planet Academia.
Sounds like when the CA Teachers Union backed the brilliant idea of not teaching reading as a skill in grade school. Wiped out 7 years worth of kids, literacy wise.
I say just shoot these types on site. It’s cheaper for society in the long run.
When I was young, there was a bit of buzz about an alphabet called Unifon. One character per phonetic sound, forty letters in all. Neat idea, but looked weird. I was all for it, even though I went on to become an ecselent speler. Kill me as soon as txt msgs become the preferred way of writing. kthxbye
I think it is a good idea that is 150 years overdue. I weep, in spelling bees.
Does this mean that we can cut teacher’s salaries? Wow, think of the savings, we could put all that money into wellfare and prisons.
actually, I believe the headline on the article is slanted based on the excerpts quoted. I read it as asking the question of why is english so rule based with so many exceptions to every rule? This necessitates more learning for no benefit. I believe the proposal is to simplify the language with which I fully agree.
AUFSM?
What I want to know is how generations of children before now managed to cope with English spelling and punctuation and now, all of a sudden, it’s too hard?
I know my spelling is a little iffy now and then, and my use of apostrophes is dubious now and then but I do my best and I see no reason why such things should be dropped from because it’s “too hard”. Do we drop anything that is a challenge and just do easy stuff? if so we need to have degrees in “colouring in” and “the advanced use of crayons”.
It may seem minor, some may say that they should spend more time on more technical or useful subjects, but then how would they effectively record and report what they are doing if the basics of written English was “too hard” and been dropped from their education?
Has education become options? are schools just somewhere to keep the kids off the streets while parents are at work?
@#6: Interesting choice of time-frame. In my country of origin language reformers did exactly that in early 19th century (so, about 150 years ago). English speakers may not recognize this as important, but having such alphabet-to-speech mapping that there is no spelling involved helps learning a lot. As mentioned, as soon as you know all letters, you can read quite fluently. Kids learn to read as early as 2 yrs old… Also, original idea of improving education overall worked well too, country went from few percent of literate people to nearly full literacy in decades after this reform.
Lets get rid of:
History – too many incongruous events
Math – too many subtheorems and parentheses
Home Ec – too many difficult measurements
Physics – way too much uncertainty
Chemistry – those valences are not orderly enough
Social Studies – What’s that about anyway? It’s too boring and tortuous for young minds.
No wonder our country is going down the shitter – education is a joke – more of a day care and politically correct socializing experiment than a demand on children to excel.
I’m dying to ask a teacher if modern kids seem to be more literate that previous generations. Now when I say literate, I mean that they read and type. Not that they UNDERSTAND what they read. NOR that they can CLEARLY COMMUNICATE what they think.
It seems to me, being an old 45 year old, that being a kid these days must be damn hard without being ablr to read a computer screen, or typing IM and SMS messages. The peer pressure to communicate via written word must be tremendous.
When I was young, before computers and cell phones, you could actually function with no reading skills. Functional illiterates where well known. But to function as an illiterate requires face to face or spoken communications, something that is almost impossible to do now.
Same thing for games. Before home consoles, you had to play with other kids face to face. Now you sit at home, by yourself, plugged into a game network. If you are lucky, you might have audio and video chat. But there is still a lot of reading to do.
Funny… the dream of 100 percent literacy may be achieved, but they won’t understand what is written.
Mongo not like spelling and punctuation. Too hard…
But… But… Mediocrity is good for Republicans! A ready-made mass of dumb idiots eager to vote at the first sign of fear/hate.
Plus the Reverends also need a herd of mediocre sheep, that’s the only way they can afford to trade at the car agency their this year’s BMW for next year’s model.
I personally don’t think that this is a bad idea. Why should our written language be some set in stone thing, especially when it is as messed up as it is.
What is the value of “ph” making an “f” sound? What is the downside of making literacy easier? It would just mean that children have more time to study things that actually matter like math.
Benjamin Franklin wanted a phonetic language, so this isn’t anything new, so doubt that anything will ever change, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t.
The insistance on making English into a non phonitic language is making it a bleep to learn to read and write.
If the process was phonitic you could learn to read and write in maybe a month.
WEBSTER(who made the first USA dictionary)
Hated the brits.
He changed the rules, spellings and pronunciation of Many words.
The problems we have are Stupid.
The USA language is a composite of Other languages, and for SOME AWFUL reason, no one has EVER converted them to English.
In most languages, the RULES for pronunciation WORK ALL THE TIME… In ours..there is ALWAYS exceptions.
Its hard for teachers to Explain to a 10 year old why 1 word has 6 meaning, and is pronounced DIFFERENT, depending on what is said.
http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/beastly/
The most definitions for 1 word…
Look up “set”
English to complex? Maybe. But I’m thinking it’s *precise*. I submit that’s the power of English. We have a word for EVERYTHING! And if we don’t, we’ll happily steal one from another language!
English spelling is pretty messed up, but that doesn’t mean we oughta let kids slide. Let ’em use the word “ain’t” if they like, but make sure they spell it right.
#21 – Esteban
Yeah, that’s right… make sure they spell it correctly. Que pasa, amigo. You’re da loco dude.
*English* is (BooHoo!) hard to spell? Try any of the various flavours of Chinese! Doesn’t seem to be holding them as a antion back much…
[And lets not even go into using a Chiense dictionary. Entire classes are taught on this subject alone.]
Twits.
P.S.: Back in high school, one of my classmates wrote “faget” on the chalkboard. The teacher came in a minute later, looked at the word, and wrote “faggot” underneath.
“If you’re going to use a homophobic slur,” she said, “at least spell it correctly.”
#23 – gromnie – Try any of the various flavours of Chinese!
No need to go to that extreme… try French.
#24 – Esteban
That’s right. 😉
#20.
Look up the word SET.
I think that wi hu spik and wriet inglish shud start writing fonetikli. It wil taik us years to lern the new spelings so the suner wi start the beter.
That’s stupid, non-english speaking countries have no problem learning their children English from the 4th of 5th grade and they seem to do pretty well.
Other languages pretty much steal every new word from English, regardless of how poorly it fits into their own language and it seems to work pretty well. SMS, email and so on is a lame example of how you could “fix” the English language, it’s completely based on the way people pronounce word, which isn’t the same all over the world or even with in the US or England, would you like to write your next book in “Redneck”?
Do they have similar problems in England?
I was one of those kids who could read at two. I have always had problem with spelling. Don’t know if there is a coralation. Been told by people on this blog I am lazy! That being said alot of furiners pay my daughter a lot of money to learn english.
Reading and writing/spelling are two different skills. Many otherwise intelligent people don’t spell too well.
Recall those joke IQ tests that ask you to count the number of “f’s” in a short sentence and the smarter you are the more likely your brain skips simple pronouns like “of” and there is an undercount.
Also the recent email that made the rounds showing that as long as the first and last letters of a word were correct with the middle letters all mixed up, most people can read the sentence without much problem?
So==spelling is wrote memorization that many intelligent people don’t see the need for. Psychologist will tell you many poor spellers have anti-authoritarian issues.
I’m all for correct spelling and errors show the amount of care put into the final project. A job resume should have no errors, a blog posting can have many as long as the meaning is clear and something interesting is being said? Its all situationally dependent.
#31 – Bobbo
>>I’m all for correct spelling
How about correct punctuation? Are you all for that too?