On the Charms of Twenty-first Century Spelling

Cambridge Assessment is a specialist agency concerned with educational assessment.    Their publication, “Research Matters”, is a useful source of research findings in the area.

One recent piece analysed the spelling errors of recent GCSE candidates.   

Their aim was explore why spelling mistakes occur, and thereby the better to understand the teaching and learning of spelling.    But the mistakes also offer insights into the minds of the kids involved;   Freudian slips that reveal the aspirations and anxieties, and the attitudes they bring to learning.

Mistakes fall into a small number of specific groups:

• spelling words as they sound:   tomarto, secutary, hurd, lade, ruff, tong, stairing, surport, or quiot;
• getting the rules wrong:   allways, asortment, angery or finaly;
• omitting, adding or swapping letters: scrunced, propbable, easly, woneman, attemted, or minuet;
• or a combination of more than one mistake, as in suficate, formiler or remmeberd.

Texting (or should that be txtg?) inevitably plays a role;   both u and thanx are evidence of that, though its influence is, if anything, less than might have been predicted as if, whatever other faux pas our GCSE cohorts may commit, they still understand that txtg and real life are not the same thing (well, yet, anyway).

Errors of the more revealing, Freudian slip, variety included:

• drumsicks (for drumsticks – at least one child is not too keen on fast food)
• everone (sounds like a child with socialisation issues)
• otheir (ditto)
• smocking (clearly confused, though I’m not entirely sure what about)
• nothink (an unconscious cry for help from a hapless examinee if ever I heard one)
• to words (for towards, but in a GCSE English exam another indication of anxiety)
• pressumably (note the underlying hint of enforcement, so appropriate in school)
• hast (for asked, but again with overtones of obligation)
• skatebord (physical activity is not to everyone’s taste).

Occasionally, all sense is lost.    With some , the authors offer their own interpretation, no doubt derived from the original context:   blacks for blackouts, canures for cancerous, nufse for nervous, or troud for trouble.    But what is apoched meant to be, or prespetion, or retruned?

At best, one can only marvel at the innate creativity of the young.    As in:

• corried door (for corridor;  presumably the perpetrator watches too many TV soaps);
• costrophobic (his/her parents must be bothered about money);
• denist (one who removes your nists, I guess);
• immeiadtley (which, as the authors point out, has all the right letters, just not necessarily in the right order);
• ant shaght (a new variant of anxious, apparently, and nothing to do with elderly female relatives indulging in activities that I fear I must leave to your imagination)

Good stuff.

16 March, 2009
Sources: Quodlibs 329
Research Matters, Cambridge Assessment, January 2009 pp26-31

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