SPELLING SUCCESS

Many of us struggle with spelling, but there are a variety of strategies that we can use to overcome the most common of literacy difficulties, writes Dr Blum...

Spelling is in many ways the toughest of all literacy skills. To spell correctly, the pupil has to be one hundred per cent accurate in their recall of every letter, whereas to read with one hundred per cent accuracy you can get away with scanning words without the need for photographic recall of each and every letter sequence you see.

Over the years, I have seen spelling as the literacy skill that can trigger off the highest level of emotional frustration and feeling of negativity from secondary school students. For a small minority they have spent years covering up their spelling limitations and many have long since given up trying to improve it. Even pupils with an otherwise mature literacy skill set can often find their spelling is still an area of weakness. So what can be done about it?

A lot of controversy and mystery surrounds the art of spelling. Good spellers, like good readers, often don’t remember what explicit strategies they actually used to learn their skill. For many, it’s just an unconscious talent they acquired. For the majority, a lot of reading was enough to reinforce their spelling skills. Sometimes they will tell you that they learned to spell by having a lot of spelling tests at school. But when asked how they actually learned the spellings for the tests, they can’t really remember a particular strategy. Perhaps they knew most of them already and simply wrote them out correctly for the test. It’s likely that they combined three particular skills which poorer spellers often lack:

• A good visual memory for what they have seen in print while reading.

• A secure motor movement memory, so that they remembered automatically how their hand should move across a page to form a word correctly. In situations when they were not sure, they would simply write the word out in a couple of versions and assess which one ‘felt right’, in terms of movement.

• A good aural memory for the sounds in words and which combinations of letters represent them on each occasion.

Good spellers find that spelling words correctly comes so naturally to them that they do it intuitively and without conscious effort. Obviously, this will be the situation in which many teachers and indeed many parents find themselves.Yet, what poor-spelling pupils need more than anything else are explicit strategies to help them spell better. The intuition and unconscious talent of their teachers and ever-helpful parents won’t help them improve their spelling for a spelling test.

Let’s look at the most common strategy that a parent would use to help a pupil improve their spelling or learn a word for a spelling test. ‘Look, Cover, Write and Check’ is a very visual strategy. The pupil looks at the word and tries to visualise it in their mind’s eye. The word is covered, and the pupil writes it from memory. The word is uncovered, and the pupil checks it. If it is incorrect, the pupil starts the process again, keeping on until they get it right.

This is a good structural basis for interventions aimed at strengthening specific aspects of visual memory. But it just won’t work for some people. They need to explore other visual and multi-sensory strategies. So here are a couple of useful strategies to experiment with — less often taught but very useful to know.

Word Within the Word

A word itself is the most obviously recognisable chunk of another word. For example: textiles — word within word: ‘text’ or ‘tiles’ daddy — word within word: ‘add’ repeat — word within word: ‘pea’ or ‘peat’ knowledge — word within word: ‘know’ or ‘ledge’

Adding Colour

Once pupils have found parts of the word they need to focus on, one useful strategy is to highlight the bit that is the word within a word or the part of the word they find challenging:

• By shading or colouring it in.

• By drawing a picture that helps give a distinctive association to the meaning of the word.

Sounding It Out and Saying It Wrong

Many irregular words in English don’t look as they sound. A good strategy for some pupils is to ask them to sound them out phonetically, from the way they look — saying the word the wrong way, to help spell it the right way. This kind of exaggeration is sometimes called spell speaking. Here are two obvious examples.

• Wednesday — Say with the ‘Wed’ and the ‘nes’ clearly audible.

• Island An island is what it says — ‘is land’ — so say it like that to help you with this irregular spelling.

There are many other spelling strategies (mnemonics, motor skill memory, word banks) and there is not time to go into them all here. If your son or daughter struggles with spelling, the most crucial strategy for spelling better is the personal desire to succeed at it and conquer the problem. Building up a positive emotional commitment to improving spelling is the one essential strategy. Without it, no other spelling technique can work.

For further information on spelling strategies, please contact the Learning Support Department.