Are take-home spelling and vocab tasks essential- or are they just contributing to student anxiety? One expert thinks that they’re an opportunity for even the most well-meaning of parents to ‘pile on the stress and pressure’ – and 76% of primary school teachers seem to agree.
Writing in The Guardian, Jane Considine is well-versed in all things literacy, spelling and the learning process. As an OFSTED inspector turned educational consultant with of the National Literacy Strategy, she spent lockdown running a literacy drive on YouTube and writing a book aimed at teachers to help with the issue of spelling in the classroom, The Spelling Book: Transforming the Teaching of Spelling- and she’s got some fresh new ideas on what the weekly spelling test means for pupils all over the world.
It’s something you likely remember from your own school days: getting issued with a list of ten to twenty words that were at your reading level, taking them home, and learning them through a process of ‘look-say-cover-write-check’ for a class test the next week. Some students excel at spelling, some are passable and just need to hone their skills, and some struggle and need extra help – it’s the very nature of mixed-ability learning groups. But for Jane Considine, the mechanism is flawed: “I’m not anti-tests generally,” she explains in the article in Guardian Education. “But school spelling tests have an essential design flaw, which is that involving parents hugely amplifies the opportunity to pile on the stress and pressure.”
Parents, she explains, are extremely good at ‘modelling anxiety’ – whilst everybody wants their children to succeed in school, some parents whose children struggle with these spelling tasks can pass on that anxiety they feel when they see their child finding it difficult- and Considine thinks that this cyclical anxiety isn’t helpful when it comes to learning how to spell. 76% of the 1,362 primary school teachers that she surveyed agree that this kind of testing isn’t an effective way to teach spelling, too – and it’s also their least favourite subject to teach, except for PE.
It’s an interesting idea, removing the staple of the take-home vocab list and the in-class spelling test from this early relationship with literacy. It’s relevant to the discussion surrounding neurodiversity in education too - think of students with dyslexia. When it comes to learning to spell, this particular neurodiversity sometimes makes it difficult to keep up with their peers in reading and writing skills. The spelling list is a difficult enough task for some when they’re sat in the classroom, and transporting that to a home environment could create a lot of anxiety and disengagement. Spelling assessments in general can create feelings of embarrassment and anxiety for students with dyslexia, as can being put on the spot with any reading or writing task, and involving anxious parents in the process could potentially complicate the matter further.
It’s a compelling angle that could potentially be used to inform the decisions we make regarding all kinds of literacy education, and it raises a lot of questions about the learning process in other subjects. Could memory-based spelling and vocab assessment represent a problem when it comes to learning a foreign language too? The idea raises a lot of questions that interrogate one of the building blocks of our early relationships with language, and it’ll be interesting to see what theories develop and where this research goes.