Oral spelling?

[Cecily]

I've just noticed that the subtitle of this area of the forum is "All about spelling, both in written and oral form."

What is the "oral form" of spelling? Is it just pronunciation?

[Maeve]

Beats me. Spelling Bee spelling?

[Sound of Silence]

Lol. I think it's phonetics (oral), yeah. My kid's dyslexic and he has his own written as well as oral language going on; i think it represents that, maybe...?

[Cecily]

@Maeve: Surely the spelling in a spelling bee is the same as conventional spelling? Isn't that the point?

@Sound: That's an imaginative answer, and I guess it may be right, but I still don't think the "oral form" of spelling is a suitable replacement for the word "phonetic".

[Sound of Silence]

I think Maeve was just playing with homophones, C, (spelling be (is) spelling, only he's chosen its homophone 'bee' just as a gentle joke). My son spells 'be' with diagrapgh 'ee', so I can see the point he's making: spelling bee spelling, all right. :)

Dyslexics sometimes write the word as they hear them spoken (phonetically), so 'oral word' and phonetic do have ties. Take a nose in your dictionary and you'll see phonetic representations of written words too. :)

[Cecily]

Thanks. I have noticed the phonetic spellings in dictionaries ;) and know of IPA. I just thought "oral spelling" a strange and ambiguous phrase.

I've now Googled it and found various articles, but they are invariably academic papers, so I think the term is probably less widely known than phonetic/phonic. Certainly "phonic" is a well-known term in the UK because of debates about how to teach children to read.

[Maeve]

I wasn't aware that the term "oral spelling" existed outside this thread. I was being facetious. I suggested a spelling bee because in a spelling bee, the contestants spell the words aloud, hence, "orally."

Spelling is the association of speech sounds with written symbols. When people "misspell" a word,
they are using a symbol other than the one conventionally associated with the speech sound being represented. Both be and bee are phonetic spellings.

[Feeby]

How curious. :) I've never heard of oral spelling either. Or at least I haven't heard of phonetic spelling called oral before... Hmm.