Dialect and Spelling.

Abstract

American culture, particularly the educational and business subcultures, places an inordinate value upon the ability to spell correctly. Students at all levels of our schools are severely penalized for misspelled words in themes and essays which otherwise may be excellent in content. Good spelling is at least as valued an asset in a secretary as shorthand or typing speed. This in spite of the fact that a moderate number of misspelled words in any written communication almost never interferes with understanding. Furthermore, when one wishes to attack the American public schools-and tires of berating them for not teaching Johnny to read-one can always point to the fact that so many of our products cant spell. Upon these two points there seems to be fairly universal agreement: spelling is terribly important, and the schools are not teaching spelling very well. teaching of spelling in the elementary schools is currently undergoing a change comparable in many respects to the curriculum revolutions in mathematics, science, and the social studies. Many of the new spelling textbooks are now being designed to teach children the relationships between the sounds (phonemes) of American English and the letters (graphemes) which represent these sounds in written form. This trend does not, to be sure, go unchallenged. We have, then, a controversy over the most economical way to teach spelling to children. This controversy has been well described by Albert Yee in his article, The Generalization Controversy in Spelling in Elementary English, February, 1966. Briefly recapitulated the two positions may be stated as follows: 1) American English spelling is so arbitrary in its relationship to the pronunciation of words that rules or about spelling from sounds to letters are not productive enough to be taught. 2) While it is true that we do not utilize a perfect phonemic alphabet there is enough regularity between sounds and spelling to make teaching spelling generalizations more economical than simply teaching the spelling of each word as the child needs to use it in his writing. Ideally, the answers to such controversial issues should be based upon research, not theory or opinion. One of the basic questions which research can answer is: What is the relationship between sounds and letters in American English? One attempt to answer this particular question was U.S.O.E. Project 1991 conducted at Stanford University under the direction of Paul R. Hanna. results of