An international delegation will be present at the Scripps Spelling Bee finals in Washington DC mounting an informational picket on Wed, May 27 and Thurs, May 28 campaigning for awareness of the social and personal problems caused by the irregularity of English spelling and to promote remedies to improve literacy.
Ex Engliahs Teacher, Masha Bell, from Dorset will be among the delegates on the sidewalk in Washington, raising awareness of the spelling problems facing more than half the population of both the UK and USA.
The Scripps Spelling Bee in 2009 welcomes 293 champion spellers from across the USA to compete against each other in the capital in this popular televised competition. Competitors range in age from 9-15 years old. These exceptional youngsters include 33 students whose first language is not English.
The Spelling Society point to the fact that the competitors are ‘exceptional’
Results from this survey were compared with those from an identical survey undertaken in the UK in 2008 by ICD Research. The findings were perturbing: more than half of the adult population questioned in both countries had problems spelling one or more words in the test. One in three adults in both countries are reliant on spell checkers for tasks such as completing job application forms or writing important letters, and men perform less well than women in both countries.
'Embarrassed' topped the incorrect list with 62% miss-spelling this word in the USA, compared to 54% in the UK.
Elizabeth Kuizenga, leading the picket in Washington this week says: ‘The current fossilized system is hard for many to use. Adults in the USA consistently performed less well on all ten words tested. Interestingly, in both the USA and in the UK, men performed less well than women. Women may celebrate an intelligence victory here, but should also know that the only word that men spelled better than women in the USA was 'liaison'! We’re here in the capital to highlight these problems and show that not everyone in the US or the UK is proficient at spelling.’
Jack Bovill, Chair of the Spelling Society asks: Have Spelling Bees in their 84 years helped to improve national spelling skills in the USA? The answer is an emphatic NO. Consistently, without spelling skills, this nation and the UK turn out citizens from their schools to be economic drop-outs, unable to spell competently and thus suffering from word poverty and then economic poverty. This does not have to be so. Look at the two recent spelling surveys, one in the UK and the other in the USA. The poor spelling shown in these two surveys cannot be the children, the schools, the parents or the governments since they are both different. It has to be something else.
Elizabeth Kuizenga, leader of the Informational Picket asks: ‘where are all the children who either did not join in this Spelling Bee show or dropped out? Are we only going to celebrate the lucky few who can memorise the 3,750 irregular spellings and not understand what happens to those who are discarded for life? Can we afford this human loss and its cost, papering over the cracks with a Spelling Bee that has not improved national spelling skills throughout its history?’
Notes to editors:
Members of the Society will be available for interview outside the Hyatt hotel Washington DC on May 27-28th. Please contact: Vikki Rimmer on +44 (0)1322 866293 or +44 (0)7886673412.
For further information and full text of the recent survey please visit www.spellingsociety.org
• 65% of unemployed adults have minimal or no literacy skills.
• The US Department of Labor estimates that illiteracy costs business and taxpayers $25 billion a year thru workplace accidents and lost productivity.
• Roughly $5 billion a year in taxes go to support public assistance recipients who are unemployable because of illiteracy.
• 60% of prisoners are illiterate and 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems
