d. Phonics and spelling
Your student teachers will almost certainly come up against different approaches to the teaching of spelling. It is helpful to suggest certain principles:
- Spelling should be seen as part of learning to read and write and taught in this context.
- Student teachers should recognise and actively develop children's capacity for seeing patterns in the words they read and write – to draw inferences and analogies.
- While there is a need to teach basic sight vocabulary, children will enlarge their capacity to recognise words as they develop independent strategies.
- children are actually fascinated by words, their sounds, shapes and meanings, so teaching spelling should never be dull!
Student teachers should be encouraged to build up a repertoire of activities for the teaching of spelling. An excellent resource is Understanding Spelling by Olivia O'Sullivan and Anne Thomas (2000) CLPE.
Activity i
Using the list below, discuss how the spelling system of English works.
It represents spoken sounds with letters.
- There is no simple 1:1 relation between our 42-44 phonemes and the 26 letters of the alphabet. Our rich array of vowel sounds poses a particular problem.
Call, car, cake, cat, he, hen, her, hi, him, to, top, torn, tone, cup, cute,
- The rime unit is a more reliable guide to pronunciation than the individual letters of which it is composed – particularly the vowels. This holds true for regional variation in pronunciation.
bag, flag; fame, shame; dance, glance; told, bold; fall, tall; look, cook; would, should etc.
- Our spelling system tells us about meaning as well (or sometimes instead of) pronunciation: many morphemes preserve their spelling while their pronunciation changes in different words
please, pleasure; south, southern; jumped, landed.
Ask your student teachers to look at spelling materials in groups, examining whether they draw children’s attention to these patterns. Using this and the table in 6d, activity i, get them to develop their own materials to help children master spelling patterns.
Connections to Standards
Q 6, 7a, 14, 22, 25, 28.
See also 3b. Phonics and 4c. Learning to spell
 
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