Pronunciation Bee

The upper right corner, where spellings and answers for
anything can be found

On Fridays, the Stephens School holds its weekly school programs. These include fashion shows, dance competitions, and trivia. This past Friday, we held a Spelling Bee. Can you spell “smiles”??

Eight faces, zero happiness

"You want me to spell what? Fine.
Irascible. I-..."

"...H-A-T-E-T-H-I-S. Irascible"

Ok, so the Spelling Bee wasn’t as big a hit as Sports Week was, but the students nevertheless increased their English spelling repertoires in the name of school competition and house pride. We ran two heats—the junior competition and the senior competition. For each heat, three to four students were selected from each house to be the designated spellers. These students were given a large packet of many English words several days before the Bee. The teachers picked words from this packet on the day of the competition. Students memorized these long lists. Memorization was key to success for several reasons. First, no disambiguating context was given for homophones like “knight”—students simply had to know that “night” was absent from the list. Second, the words in the senior heat were thrown together by teachers using the internet with wild abandon. There was very little evidence that content was considered at all. My guess is the teachers could tell me the meaning of about a quarter of the words on that list. And they could pronounce even fewer.

As resident American, I was given the title of Judge and Scorekeeper for the Spelling Bee. However, I thought of myself as the judge for the teachers. For instance, Om Sir received negative marks when he pronounced diaphragm, as in, “I could die from the pronunciation of these words.”

On one hand, I am being too harsh in order to be humorous. I have studied enough linguistics to know that everyone has an accent and that people perceive language sounds differently, depending on their native language. On the other hand, this is an English medium school and we were conducting a Spelling Bee. Given that this Spelling Bee was bereft of contextualizing sentences, pronunciation should be kind of important. If not both, it's got to be one or the other, Stephens.

Did he say influential?
I think it was influenza...
No, I'm pretty sure it was 'in french, la'

I was very impressed, however, with the participating students’ overall success. They did not know the meaning of 95% of the words they were spelling. They spelled nearly all of the words correctly. The amount of memorization and pattern recognition involved in that feat is staggering to me. Especially considering that the teachers running the event, mostly myself, couldn’t even remember which team’s turn it was. To give you a sense of what these young ESL students were up against, I will leave you with a selection of words from the senior heat that were given to the stalwart Stephens spellers:

Absorption

Acquiesce

Auxiliary

Bazaar

Bizarre (for pronunciation, see previous item)

Bravado

Cameos

Czechoslovakia

Curriculum (“Curry—Coolum”)

Dachshund

Diphthong

Influenza (It, in fact, was "influenza." But it was hard to tell)

Lycanthrope

Marquee

Myxomatosis (a highly infectious viral disease of rabbits)

Oesophagus (British spelling?)

Outmanoeuvre (British again?)

Perestroika (how did this get on the list?)

Piccalilli (A pungent relish of east India)

Potpourri (I presented this one, correctly with a silent “t”. No one had any idea what I was saying.)

Profiterole

Ptarmigan

Schadenfreude

Teutonic

Quiescence (and given to the students as “key—since”)

Uxorial
Writhe, pronounced as “rite,” and as in, I was writhing in my seat listening to the teachers’ attempts at these words. But the students persevered and “outmanoeuvred” the bizarre pronunciations with bravado by successfully memorizing a lot of words from the depths of English (and some French, German, and Russian, as it happened.)