[senco-forum] Back in SencoLand

Putting aside the orthographic transparency, I am still quite convinced

> Putting aside the orthographic transparency, I am still quite convinced
that this is the most effective way to teach people to read and write,
especially as I have also learned to read and write in other languages using
the skills acquired in my own mother tongue.<

The skills certainly, but as a foreign language teacher who occasionally
teaches bilingual children I have found it necessary to raise their
awareness first that a spelling pattern in one language isn't always
represented by the same letter or letter string in another language. A few
years ago one of my secondary school's new intake was a Year 7 girl who had
lived in Germany until she was six. Those years left her a fluent German
listener and speaker, but as German primary education starts a year later
than ours, she hadn't formally learnt how to write the language. So she
wrote "Shoole" for "Schule", using English symbol correspondence for the
sounds /sh/ and /u:/. My response was to write a German phonics course for
her, researching German-as-a-mother tongue techniques because that's not a
traditional part of German as a foreign language methodology. The fruits of
my labour are on my website at

http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/mfl/Year7German/spelling/

The girl eventually got her A in GCSE German at the end of Year 7 and we
were both especially proud of her A in German writing. She also showed an
interest in German handwriting, so I introduced her to a TrueType computer
font simulating one of the three styles taught in German schools. Throughout
all this, I kept an eye on her English spelling to make sure that her new
German orthographical skills weren't affecting her English spelling. If
anything, her already good English spelling improved. I believe strongly
that getting to grips with another language's spelling system can make one
more sensitive to one's own: "What do they know of English who only English
know?"

Although German is already a language with a very transparent orthography,
the institutions responsible for the language within the German-speaking
countries of Europe get together once in a while to simplify the orthography
even further in the name of "Rechtschreibereform" (spelling reform). France
and Spain have similar institutions to effect similar change, but the UK and
the US, let alone the other countries of the English-speaking would, lack
such national language-standardising institutions. On the other hand, I
wonder how much impact MS Word's UK and US spellcheckers have had on minor
spelling changes in recent years such as the stamping of the verbal suffix
"-ise" as the British spelling of the American English "-ize".

David Wilson
Harton Technology College, South Shields
http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/