As a research assistant for this project, I was excited to conduct my own small-scale investigation into how children’s writing had changed over time. Gender differences in language has been an interest of mine since studying English at a higher level, but I had never had the chance to look at gender differences in children – until now!
To begin my investigation, I collected 20 pieces of children’s work from the project’s database, 10 from 1979 and 10 from 2021, and in each there were 5 male and 5 female. The children were 10-11 years old (late primary school age).
All those selected were narratives, and each child had been instructed to invent a new and different ending to a well-known story.
Across both years, fairy tales such as Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs and Sleeping Beauty proved popular to write about.
Focusing specifically on the children’s spelling mistakes, I used Elliot and Johnson’s (2008) five categories to allocate the misspellings into different types. Type 1 misspellings refer to ‘sound-based’ errors such as phonetic mismatch (cud for could), Type 2 refers to ‘rules-based’ errors including suffix rules (funnyly for funnily) and Type 3, ‘Omission commission and transposition’, refers to when letters are omitted (realy for really), unnecessarily inserted (hoppe for hope) or reversed (frist for first). Type 4 misspellings focus on ‘writing’, including the incorrect spacing of a word (to-wards for towards), and lastly Type 5 refers to misspellings where there are multiple or extreme errors (or write for all right).
Whilst creating sub-corpora (mini word banks) to include the number of words written by the children, I found that overall, the children in 1979 wrote 1100 words more than the children from 2021! This huge difference shows that children’s writing, and probably our writing overall, has become more succinct and concise than it was 40 years ago, which isn’t too surprising.
Now, we all know the assumption that girls are better at spelling than boys, and this was something I grew up being told in school. But in some areas, my investigation found otherwise. In 1979, this was the case and girls DID make slightly fewer spelling mistakes (3%) than the boys (3.98%). However, in 2021 this was the opposite. The boy’s figure was 4.4%, and the girls 5.06% – a surprising difference! Does this suggest the stereotype is now outdated?
Across both genders, Type 3 mistakes were most frequently made by the children.
It’s interesting that the most common misspelling type across both 1979 and 2021 involved reversing letters, adding them or omitting them. It would be intriguing to see if this is the case for adults too…
In both year groups, there were zero results for Type 2 misspellings, suggesting this is the least common type of spelling mistake.
As we can see from the graphs, the boys’ work from the sample contained more misspellings than girls in 1979, particularly with Type 1 and 3 errors. However, in 2021 the findings are flipped, and we can see that the girls overtook the boys, most significantly in these two categories.
Considering the data from both genders together, it seems that the spelling abilities of children have decreased in the past 40 years. In 1979, only 3.46% of the words written by children were misspellings, whereas in 2021 the figure had increased to 4.73%. Although this doesn’t seem like a big difference, the children had written half the amount in comparison, making the increase more significant.
Surprisingly, this study has found that there has been a direct reversal of boys and girls spelling, and this suggests that in the last 40 years, boys have become more proficient at spelling, and girls have become slightly less! Of course, more research is needed to clarify these findings, but I can definitely say this result has caused me to question my pre-existing assumptions about gender differences in spelling. What about yours?
Written by Sophie Flanagan
References
Elliot, G. and Johnson, N. (2008) ‘All the right letters – just not necessarily in the right order. Spelling errors in a sample of GCSE English scripts.’ Cambridge Assessment.