{"id":4447,"date":"2012-10-11T15:51:37","date_gmt":"2012-10-11T15:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eltchat.org\/wordpress\/?p=4447"},"modified":"2012-10-11T15:51:37","modified_gmt":"2012-10-11T15:51:37","slug":"how-can-we-best-teach-s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eltchat.org\/index.php\/2012\/10\/11\/how-can-we-best-teach-s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g\/","title":{"rendered":"How can we best teach S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This summary was contributed by\u00a0Phil Longwell on his blog<\/a>\u00a0and is reproduced here with his kind permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Last night’s lively\u00a0ELT Chat<\/a>\u00a0(11\/07\/12) was on the topic of ‘how can we best teach spelling’ – question mark not included.\u00a0 After previous attempts to get this topic discussed and two third-places in the previous two weeks, ‘spelling’ finally won through, not least due to a minor rallying campaign.<\/p>\n

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@esolcourses<\/a>\u00a0kicked off by proposing games can be fun, suggesting, as an example, the\u00a0BBC Skillswise<\/a>\u00a0site.\u00a0@maizie<\/a>\u00a0said she used different methods – flashcards, games, spellingcity, studystacks, videos and dictations. @esolcourses added wordsearches to the list and offered\u00a0her own<\/a>. Games with words that sound the same but have different spelling and meaning, suggested\u00a0@touqo<\/a>\u00a0– basically,\u00a0homophones.<\/a>Quizlet<\/a>\u00a0suggested\u00a0@naomishema<\/a>\u00a0and@eannegrenoble<\/a>. It visually shows your mistakes, coloring (sic), erasing and adding the right letters. It’s so easy to make your own sets, apparently. In addition, you can use Hangman (@teacherphili<\/a>),\u00a0 palindromes and crosswords (@touqo) or “task: change one letter in a word to make a sentence to mean something completely different, preferably funny.”\u00a0@Hartle<\/a>\u00a0thought that all games could help\u00a0but<\/em>\u00a0not as much as systematic reading, as will now be shown.<\/p>\n

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@Hartle<\/a>\u00a0said she had noticed that students who learn a lot from songs are not good spellers and suggested reading, the more the better.\u00a0 @teflrinha,\u00a0@singernick<\/a>, @ljp2010 and\u00a0@SophiaMav<\/a>\u00a0agreed.\u00a0 In addition, using audiobooks and films with subtitles can help.\u00a0 A running thread on the issue ofseeing\/hearing words developed.\u00a0@naomishema<\/a>\u00a0said she was an avid reader at school, but didn’t learn to spell til 4th grade.\u00a0@ministryofshiny<\/a>, enjoying her first #ELTchat, doubted reading being everything – “you read with your eye and spell with your ears”, she said.\u00a0@teflerinha<\/a>\u00a0challenged this and thought it more individual – some people need to see or visualise a word, as in the technique of ‘look, say, cover, write’. @ministryofshiny responded that ‘LSCW<\/a>‘ had some logic to it.\u00a0 There is a link to a Look, Say, Cover, Write and Check chart\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Most agreed that spelling with a visual form and sound would be good for everyone, as @teflerinha said. @naomishema believed some phonics were necessary along with sight words and in her class, “the deafer [a student is] the less mistakes [are made]”.@eapteacher<\/a>\u00a0mentioned synthetic phonics – students practice spelling nonsense words, then they think how spelling relates to pronunciation.\u00a0\u00a0@teflerinha<\/a>\u00a0thought more ‘analytic phonics’ and in combination with whole word approach.\u00a0 @esolcourses added that “phonemic awareness if good, but there are so many words that don’t fit with patterns,” to which @eannegrenoble agreed. @teflerinha countered that “if you learn the full 44 sounds the vast majority of words do fit.”<\/p>\n

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@teflerinha<\/a>\u00a0mentioned a book by\u00a0Ruth Shemesh and Sheila Walter<\/a>\u00a0which uses phonics, basically teaching sounds as they relate to letters or letter combinations. @Shaunwilden knew of it but hadn’t used it much, @hartle questioned whether it worked and @teflrinha replied that it sounded good but she struggled in practice. Quite laborious, but systematic. @hartle suggested that learning another alphabet on top of IPA might be complicated.<\/p>\n

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@teacherphili<\/a>\u00a0advertised a recently published and comprehensive\u00a0book<\/a>\u00a0on this exact topic by\u00a0Johanna Stirling<\/a>, creator of the\u00a0English Language Garden<\/a>\u00a0site, who unfortunately couldn’t make the chat, but promised to speak to #ELTchat later via a podcast (see end of this post).\u00a0\u00a0@eannegrenoble<\/a>\u00a0confirms its direct relevance to ELT.\u00a0 There is also Joanna’s unique\u00a0Spelling Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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@ljp2010<\/a>, new to the ‘land of iPad’, asked what cool apps could be recommended.\u00a0 @Shaunwilden said he found most spelling apps not aimed at ELT.\u00a0 ‘The Cat In The Hat<\/a>‘ iPad app is good, said @hartle. Further apps weren’t mentioned, but they must be out there, and not just for the iPad. I believe Adrian Underhill’s\u00a0Sounds app<\/a>\u00a0recently won an ELTon award for Macmillan.<\/p>\n

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@theteacherjames<\/a>\u00a0asked whether it is more important to be able to spell or be able to use a spellchecker.\u00a0 Given the amount of technology used in checking what we write.\u00a0 Isn’t it common for internet users to rely on Google suggesting ‘did you mean…. ?’ when we misspell something? to paraphrase @hartle.@mkofab<\/a>\u00a0said she obliged students to use a spellchecker and only practise structural words eg: its\/it’s\/their\/there\/who’s\/whose etc”.<\/p>\n

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Laziness often means students don’t check when handing in ‘word’ processed documents, said @singernick. @teflerinha tells her son to check his blog output because of the message, but he misspells very phonetically because he learned that way.\u00a0 @Shaunwilden tells himself that. @SophiaMav agreed that ‘blogging motivates sts to double-check their work’.\u00a0 The issue of typing as a separate entity from actual spelling was also raised.\u00a0 We now spell ‘because’ as ‘bcoz’, ‘disguise’ as ‘disciz’ (@teflerinha) and so many other abbreviations get used.\u00a0 Nobody dared mention that this was due to the constraints of single text messages (or ‘msgs’) and Twitter’s only requirement to limit your tweet to 140 characters, so I will add that in now.<\/p>\n

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@theteacherjames also mentioned the auto-correct facility on ‘iDevices’. Indeed, users have become used to making mistakes without a care, knowing that it will get fixed. @hartle joked that her device misspells things she has typed correctly as, I will add, they only have a finite list of words, while @eannegrenoble has to persuade her device not to ‘think in French’.\u00a0\u00a0 @ljp2010 questioned whether all communication takes place electronically? ‘90% of mine,’ answered James. She later added that perfect voice recognition software will make us effectively make the user redundant.\u00a0 @teacherphili mentioned that @JohannaStirling questions whether technology is really making use worse spellers on her\u00a0blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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@teacherphili wondered about BrEng vs AmEng variations. There is a full\u00a0list here<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Some institutions in some contexts require students to learn simpler, AmEng spelling as well as pronounciation. He suggested South Korea as one example, although @theteacherjames suggested nobody minded ‘his’ (presumably BrEng) version. @teacherphili also questions whether anyone still uses ‘old-fashioned’ spelling rules.\u00a0 Both teflerinha and\u00a0@tim_crangle<\/a>\u00a0put forward ‘magic e’. The latter also put forward the idea of getting students to spell 2 name rhythmically and rapidly.<\/p>\n

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Things like ‘i before e’ have been disproven – see\u00a0QI<\/a>\u00a0clip for a funny take on this.\u00a0 This rule, designed to help us remember how to spell words such as\u00a0receive<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0chief<\/em>, seems so promising in its simplicity at first.<\/p>\n

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