What Spelling Champions Know Can Help Your Child Spell Better
Have you ever wondered why spelling bee contestants are allowed to ask to have the word defined or used in a sentence? What spelling bee champions know is these questions reveal clues about how a word is spelled. Children can learn how to unlock the secrets of words by knowing what these questions disclose about spelling a word.
The Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee rules state what a contestant can ask about a word. Here’s what each question tells the speller.
1. Please say the word again. There are 40 phonemes (sounds) in the English language. In order to spell a word correctly, a speller needs to clearly hear the sounds in a particular word. Repeating the pronunciation of the word allows the speller to hear each sound uttered in the word. The speller is then going to decode those sounds into letter combinations representing the sounds. This would be relatively straight forward if English had an alphabet system that had a letter for each sound or a consistent method of combining the 26 letters it does have to represent the extra 14 phonemes that are not directly represented by a letter. Nevertheless, there are many words that are spelled exactly as they sound and hearing the word correctly pronounced enables the speller to spell these words correctly.
2. May I have the definition, please? English is littered with homonyms (words spelled and pronounced alike) and homophones (words pronounced alike but differing in spelling, derivation, and meaning). Just think of the complications introduced by words like dear (meaning beloved), dear (meaning costly), and deer (meaning the