On her first day of Grade 4 in an unfamiliar school, Wenyi Yin could not have spelled “confusion” even if she'd wanted to.
She had a fine command of Mandarin and French, but the morning announcements, in English, were lost on the nine-year-old as she settled into her seat at Huron Street Public School in Toronto.
“When they said, ‘Please stand up for O Canada,' I didn't know what to do,” she says now.
It wasn't long, though, before Wenyi was standing and singing with her class. And now — just 2½ years later — she's about to stand on a stage and spell words a lot more challenging than “confusion.”
Wenyi is on her way to the CanSpell regional spelling bee on March 5, and if she wins there, the 11-year-old will move on to national events in Ottawa and Washington.
“I have a certain interest in spelling,” she says, and like any true natural, she doesn't question it: “I don't know — it just is interesting.”
It's more than interesting to Jack Chambers, a sociolinguist at the University of Toronto.
“That is extraordinary,” says Prof. Chambers, who points out that learning a language and becoming a good speller are different things.
“Everybody knows children have a God-given ability for mastering language that gets lost somewhere around puberty,” he says. “But spelling is not something that's a gift; it's an acquisition. It's something we have to learn, and it's a lot more like learning how to play chess than learning how to speak.”
Wenyi spoke her first words in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun, where she was born in 1994.
When she was 5, her parents moved the family to Belgium, where her father, a chemical engineer, earned his doctorate, and where French is spoken at school.
“We couldn't speak French,” says her father, Zhihui Yin. “Suddenly, in eight or nine months, she spoke fluent French.” In 2003, Mr. Yin finished his studies. He and his wife, Yajie, decided to move to Canada, where Mr. Yin found a research position at the University of Toronto.
When they left Belgium, her father says, Wenyi's English vocabulary consisted of two words: “Okay and bye-bye, and that's it.”
The Yins arrived in Canada that July and, for the next two months, tried to expose their daughter to as much English as they could. They took Wenyi to libraries and found French books to take home, where she looked up the words in a French-English dictionary. They sat her in front of the TV to watch movies in English. They encouraged her to play with the neighbours' kids.
When September rolled around, Mr. Yin dropped his little girl off at school, his fatherly hope tinged with guilt over the new adjustments she would face. But this time, Wenyi learned even more quickly.
“In November [of 2003], I came to pick her up at school,” he says. “I saw her with her friends and she was speaking English.
“I talked to her mom and said, ‘We have to learn from her, some English. We're too slow.'” Wenyi was in good company at Huron; about one-third of the 430 students have a first language other than English. She was matched with another Mandarin-speaking student, who served as a mentor.
While she initially appeared shy and quiet, Wenyi was soaking up words like a sponge. When her parents would bring home a fresh batch of books from the library, thinking they would keep her busy for a week, she'd take them back after a few hours and ask for more.
“I remember I learned English, the everyday words, in three months I guess,” she says. “I just listened to other people say it, and it just registered in my head. It just started building up, bit by bit.”
Then, one morning last fall, her ears pricked up during morning announcements. “Do you like to S-P-E-L-L?” Samantha Berman, a Grade 5 teacher, asked over the PA system. “Is spell check a superfluous tool for you? Do you like competition?”
Yes, Wenyi thought. She liked words — all of them, she says — so she made her way to Room 13 for the inaugural meeting of the school's CanSpell Club on Oct. 3.
The club's 11 members, from Grades 4, 5 and 6, met once a week. Using the CanSpell study list, they would fill their 45-minute lunch break with word games, crossword puzzles and forays into the dictionary to find the words' origins and definitions — words like ‘Lilliputian' and ‘oxytocia' and ‘hydrangea.'
At their first bee on Jan. 26, in front of their classmates, the competitors dropped off, one by one, as they worked through a list of about 50 words. When her last opponent flubbed ‘attuned,' Wenyi got it right, then coasted to victory on a gimme. “It was so easy,” she says. “It was ‘helmet.'
“ This month, she advanced another step by winning a written bee, overseen by Ms. Berman. That win assured Wenyi's role as Huron's representative at the regionals on March 5. She will face spellers from 73 other Toronto schools in a showdown at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, one of 14 regional bees to be held across the country.
The winner and runner-up from each regional contest will advance to the CanWest CanSpell National Spelling Bee in Ottawa on April 5. The winner from each region will also get to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, from May 29 to June 2.Quick as the whiz kid latched on to her latest language, Wenyi's in no rush to change her somewhat casual training schedule at home.
“I'm not practising yet,” she says, “but I think I will.”
areinhart@globeandmail.com
