preview

Horobin Essay

Decent Essays

Spelling has taken on a kind of special status in English: good spelling equates to high intelligence. This assumption, Horobin argues, is a red herring: good spelling is simply a matter of memorisation.

And it’s not always just a case of how good your memory is – spellings just change sometimes. Horobin encourages us to remember that “our standard spelling is just an arbitrary set of conventions which were only fully codified in the 19th century”.

While children have to pass tests, how far does learning to spell always have to be an exercise in parroting? Spelling, Horobin suggests, could be used “as a door to a wider understanding and appreciation of the structure of the English language, its history and its diversity”. Learning about silent letters is absolutely baffling to a lot of children, for example, but “as relics of earlier pronunciations, they are interesting ways of signalling how the language has changed over time”. This …show more content…

Take a simple word like “justice”. You’ve probably known how to spell it for so long that you’ve forgotten that the ending (spelling the sound “iss” as “ice”) is counterintuitive to a lot of children. Explaining that the word is borrowed from French, however, might make it clearer. Sounded out in French, the sound at the end makes a bit more sense (by analogy to a place like Nice). A very brief explanation of this kind is a chance for a short history lesson (French was spoken at the medieval court in England) and a reminder that children already know a lot more French than they realise.

Teaching spelling in this way may make learning it more interesting but also encourage creativity. I’ve always had a feeling that the loosening of conventions around spelling and punctuation might help children and young people to feel more empowered or authentic in their use of language. Maybe textspeak could help a young person feel able to use their own words in their own

Get Access