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TThe Scripps National Spelling Bee is an object of curiosity and perplexity. Of the millions of people who will follow ESPN's blanket coverage at this week's competition outside of Washington DC, marvel at the composure of your pre-teen competitors, but you may be wondering : Is not spelling a robotic rote learning exercise? Who would waste time memorizing words that no one ever uses? And what is the age of spell checking?
This skepticism about the relevance of spelling is widespread. When I decided to attend the Bee in 2007, my dad asked why I was not spending my time doing anything more practical, like science fairs or the National Geography Bee. It is true that some spellings only have long lists of random words, while others are responsible for working the dictionary page by page. If it was only spelling, detractors of the bee – including spelling reformers who stung it every year – would have an interest. As a tutor for about 20 competitors in this year's bee, the choruses are well known.
But the accusation of memorization by heart does not hold. It's impossible to memorize more than 400,000 entries in the dictionary, and that's not what the best spellers try to get to the national television final on Thursday night. The best spellings are badytical thinkers, language lovers who have mastered the basic principles of linguistics. They learn hundreds of roots of Greek and Latin words and master the phonetic rules of each major language that has contributed to the English lexicon, including Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish , Portuguese, Greek and Japanese.
Spelling is a science – spells are "word detectives", which collect clues about the identity of their suspects. Every information that a spelling can ask provides a valuable context that helps them understand the word. The etymological origin indicates to a spelling what set of phonetic rules apply. You would interpret the string of sounds you hear differently if you knew that the word came from Spanish instead of Italian. For example, the nasalized sound that we hear at the beginning of the word gnocchi is spelled gn in Italian, not in Spanish, nh in Portuguese, and gn in French.
The application of each rule requires a thorough judgment. Words are like mini-ecosystems; each sound depends on the next. In many languages, there are several possible spellings for a given sound. The spelling you use depends on the specific sound sequence. For example, in Italian, the hard sound is spelled g in front of the vowels a, o, and youbut it's written gh in front of the letters e and I, which is why the musical term largo is spelled with a gbut Larghetto is spelled with gh. The definition of a word contains keywords indicating that the word contains particular roots, on which the spelling checker can then query the pronomiser.
Receiving confirmation of the presence of these roots transforms many seemingly intimidating words into a paved walk. Part of the speech is often crucial. For example, the purposes -we and -ous sound the same thing but -ous is used exclusively for adjectives, while -we is used for names. In words derived from French, plural nouns end with X or sbut these letters are usually silent. The only way to know that they are present is to know that a word is plural. Alternative pronunciations are also useful: they limit the number of possible spellings, since the correct spelling must work for all pronunciations of the word. The practice for the bee is to improve the ability of a spelling to apply this process. Part of what makes Bee's television so captivating is that you watch the spellers using this process with a strict two-minute limit.
As a tutor, what makes the Bee so rewarding is that it represents the culmination of dozens of hours spent practicing these techniques with my students (in addition to hundreds of hours of outside of our sessions). I perceive my protégés on roots, common suffixes and phonetic rules, and we apply them to thousands of example words. We refine their form detection abilities and sense of intuition: they categorize words and learn to recognize exceptions. We discuss strategies for specific word types (for example, geographic words, scientific genre names) and how to address the vocabulary questions of the preliminary test. In addition to our weekly one – hour sessions, many of my trainees participate in off – season spelling bees such as the North South Foundation Bee and the South Asian Spelling Bee.
At one point, despite the undeniable thrill of competition, bees' orthographic preparation transcends the narrow purpose of claiming the trophy for the much vaunted love cup. Spellers learn to behave gracefully under pressure and learn humility in the face of the inevitable interventions of luck. They appreciate the value of hard work, but they also come to recognize that even merit and preparation have their limits. In a divisive world like ours, such a lesson deserves to be learned.
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