SIT DOWN AND SPELL

MARY JANE L. MACASPAC

Imagine that you’re visiting some freinds,chatting in the living room when their adorable sixteen-month-old-did waddles up and says”Me want mama” One parent glares at the toddler and says sternly, No! You’re not getting a banana or anything else until you speak properly!”- then turns to you with a disgusted shake of the head,commenting, “We’re raising a generation of illiterates these days!Well that anything goes’philosophy doent fly in our house. We demand rigor and precision in communication.”

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who would actually react like this (and if I have, I don’t want to know about it. But the response is only a slight exaggeration of those traditionalists respond when children in the primary grades are encouraged to write before they can spell correctly. Invented spelling closely related to Whole Language, is based, first of all, on the discovery that children go through fairly predictable stages in the way they write words.The early attemps at spelling like the early attemps at speaking aren’t random or sloppy but reasonableapproximation that suggest a certain level of skill development. In fact, some people in the field prefer the term “developmental spelling”— if only to emphasis that children in such classrooms aren’t being taught to spell incorrectly and that accurate spelling will eventually be expected.

— oOo—

II at San Roque Dau High School, Lubao

The author is Teacher Pampanga