| Spelling
Poor spellers
As with reading, newly arrived poor spellers need urgent help before bad habits become ingrained, and they label themselves as weak spellers - or worse, as dyslexic (rarely true) - and simply give up trying. Weak spellers have usually fallen at one of the stages of acquiring the complex, but patterned spelling of English:
- preliminary » semi-phonetic » phonetic » transitional » independent (Dewsbury, 1994).
Most are stuck in the transitional stage, with a mix of entirely correct spellings, phonetic approximations, and errors that display an imperfect grasp of common patterns. Secondary schools need to: assess the scale of a new cohort’s spelling problems; identify who suffers most; diagnose the difficulties of the weakest spellers; address the problem systematically:
- in each subject
- across the school
- for individual pupils.
Assessment and diagnosis
Commercial spelling tests can help with assessing the scale of new pupils’ difficulties; they also identify who suffers most. Diagnostic assessments, using samples of the student’s own writing, can pin down the individual difficulties of the weakest spellers, identifying their particular problems with:
- omissions (missed letters)
- substitutions (wrong letters)
- insertions (superfluous letters)
- reversals
and their incidence.
Underachieving and registered pupils
Targeted support for diagnosed difficulties has often been effectively achieved in small group work, 1:1 interventions, brief withdrawal sessions, and extra-curricular teaching. Once again, intensive support seems to work best. Such approaches are valuably supported by: spelling contracts (sometimes involving parents as proof-readers); paired spelling support (using older pupils), spelling clubs, and individual monitoring. The clue to success lies more in building and applying a grasp of patterns than being able explicitly to repeat given rules. In this regard, spelling games that require successive predictions can be particularly helpful (word completions, Hangman, Shannon’s game, and variations on them [www.resourcekt.co.uk/shannon/shannon.htm; www.spelling.hemscott.net]). Individual help should also to take account of different learning styles, and draw upon visual, auditory and kinesthetic strategies, as appropriate.
Subject teaching
All pupils can be helped by explicit attention to the spelling of a subject’s core terms, and particularly by teaching their:
- patterns
- etymology
- morphology
- the meanings of morphological units
and by displaying key words. These strategies may be especially important for words of Greek and Latin origin, and contribute directly both to accurate spelling, and conceptual understanding in the subject.
 
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