Re: Children's spelling

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@...>
wrote:

> suzmccarth wrote:
> > Hi STeve, I read this in your bibliogarphy:
> >
> > "Read, C, 1986. Children's creative spelling. London: Routledge

&

> > Kegan Paul. This is only part of the wealth of evidence that

young

> > children `naturally ` spell concisely and economically. e.g. `Th
> > plan mad a fosd ladig at th epot' [see invented spellings]"
> >
> > In my observation the senence would go through these stages.
> >
> > DPMFLATA - One symbol per word
> >
> > DPMDFLDATAP - One symbol per syllable ('at the' becomes AT, as
> > previous t devoices th)
> > [...]
>
> Not to be wary of you, but is this really "your observation", or

is it the

> common persuasion among teachers?
>
> I ask this because the stages of development you describe are

exactly the

> same which have been described to me also by the teachers of my 6

y.o. kid.

> And exactly the same stages of development I have found in some

books about

> didactics of writing which I got from my local library (I don't

recall the

> titles, sorry).
>
> However, while I could witness myself the "One symbol per

syllable" stage in

> my own son's attempts to write (as well as in the attempts by his

school

> friends), so far I have not yet seen a single convincing example

of the "One

> symbol per word" stage.

I was going to save a pile of writing samples this year and scan
them in and post some but ... I didn't get around to it this year.

Actually here it is called the morphemic stage or even
morphemic/syllabic. Sometimes children just scribble but they know
how to write their name without knowing sound values for the
letters. They can recognize words like "McDonalds".

I do believe this stage exists but it is very idiosyncratic. "THE"
is represented, but the prepositions are dropped and a child will
just put down a letter for every few syllables when it seems
important. They also have a fanciful and decorative approach so the
letters have their own shapes, not standard. Sometimes a big animal
is described by using bigger letters, letters that have no sound
equivalent to the name of the animal.

They are at the stage where writing represents meaning but not
specifically "sounds".

I doubt most teachers here ever think about the history of writing.
THey don't make the connections your son's teachers are making and
the labels aren't so specific.

You inspire me to keep a range of samples next year.

My point was to find out what these stages had to do with spelling
reform.

Suzanne

>
> Two years ago, when my son was 4, his teachers organized an

exhibitions of

> writing samples produced by children of various ages (2 to 7 y.o.)

collected

> in various parts of Italy, including my son's kindergarten class,

which was

> part of that experiment. The samples were subdivided in exactly

the same

> stages that you described, which were labeled as "ideographic"

(sic),

> "syllabic" and "phonemic".
>
> All the samples were accompanied by a "translation" in "adults'

writing"

> which was added by the teacher by asking the kid what (s)he had

written.

>
> However, the samples classified in the "ideographic" stage (or, in

your more

> correct terms, "one symbol per word" stage) were highly

unconvincing: it was

> clear that the children did trace some abstact signs resembling

writing, and

> that some of those signs were recognizably inspired by actual Roman

(*)

> letters.
>
> (* Not only Roman letters, actually. In my son's attempts there

were also

> several instances of a Greek capital Psi. My son used that sign

especially

> to "spell" the name of fishes or other sea animals, and the

teachers were

> delighted when they discovered that, the previous summer, we spent

our

> holydays in Greece, and that our hotel room was just in front of

the sign of

> a "PSAROTAVERNA" ('seafood restaurant'). They immediately assumed

that he

> had associated the initial PSI with seafood and, hence, with fish.

But I

> made them notice that, for obvious reasons, we do not normally

stress the

> relationship between the meat or seafood that the kid finds in his

dish and

> the "poor" living animals which got killed to obtain it. Moreover,

I made

> them notice that the sign occurred also in "words" which had

nothing to do

> with fish, Greece, or restaurants.)
>
> However, in almost no case there was an actual correspondence

between the

> NUMBER of words in the "translation" and the number of symbols in

the

> "written" text.
>
> And, indeed, it is not surprising that children cannot

correctly "count" the

> "words" in a sentence, considering that the very concept or "word"

derives

> from the knowledge of formal grammar and of writing itself

(specially from

> word-spacing), which children as supposed to acquire at a much

later stage.

> Notice that linguist themselves cannot come up with an agreed-upon
> definition of what the term "word"! On the other hand, the concept

of

> "syllable" seems to be much more intuitive and natural, as without

that

> concept children would be unable to understand (and thus sing

aloud) the

> prosody of nursery songs.
>
> All this was to say that I am a bit skeptical about some

hypothesis about

> writing which seem to be considered commonplace by Western

schoolteachers,

> especially when they include the controversial concept

of "ideography", and

> even more so when they seem to consider the apparently Euro-

centric idea of

> an evolutive path which goes "ideograms -> syllabograms ->

alphabet",

> considered as the universal and natural evolution from "primitive"

to

> "civilized" forms of writing.
>
> --
> Marco
>
> P.S. Sorry for being so verbose today...