From USA Today last week around the time of the National Spelling Bee:
"Louisa Moats, author of several textbooks about language, said good spelling, in a word, means credibility."If a paper or an application or a report or even an e-mail contains spelling errors, people who read it judge it harshly," she said. Research even shows that people with misspellings on job applications and résumés are less likely to get interviews.
Moats and others say many public schools now give the subject short shrift in instruction. "That's the shocking thing," she said. "You can walk into many classrooms these days and there is no spelling program, there is no spelling book." Even if there is a spelling program, she said, it's "an afterthought, and it's usually just a list of words that kids are told to go and learn — there's very little instruction in how it all works, how it makes sense."
J. Richard Gentry, an educational consultant and author of the 2004 book The Science of Spelling, said the USA's reading problem is partly a spelling problem.
"Across the country we have all these fourth-graders who are failing reading tests, and we've seen this pattern for about 15 years," he said. "Guess what we stopped doing about 15 years ago? We pulled all the spelling books off the shelves and stopped teaching spelling — or at least we put it on the back burner."
Gentry said many schools still teach spelling, but that it "varies to a ridiculous degree." In many communities, he said, spelling has all but disappeared simply because it isn't tested annually on state reading exams."
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