Word wizards go beyond the letter

Young contestants are brushing up on their vocabulary in preparation for the city's annual Spellbulary competition on Sunday.

The contest is now in its eighth year, but unlike other spelling bees, students who misspell a word can stay in the game by correctly defining its meaning and the spelling of another subsequent word.

"The focus in not memorisation but showcasing natural ability and fostering a love of words," says Kelly Yang, creator of Spellbulary and managing director of the Kelly Yang Project, a creative writing and learning programme.

Learning vocabulary in today's technological age is arguably more important than spelling, but in the absence of a natural environment to absorb a rich catalogue of words, this can prove difficult.

"I see so many children struggling to learn vocabulary but they are all tediously memorising list after list and they don't even know why they are doing it," Yang says.

That is why vocabulary has been a component of Spellbulary from the start and now major spelling bee competitions are beginning to catch on to the benefits of a wider understanding of words rather than purely committing a sequence of letters to memory.