![]() Sometimes parents say that their child is a good reader but a poor speller. ”Aside from a tiny percentage (2%?) of children with very special needs, the reason why kids struggle with getting stuff down on paper is that the process of linking sounds to spellings has not been automatised in the early years and that’s the fault of poor pedagogy” What to do about the boy who hates writing. Encoding, or spelling, involves recall memory, memory without prompts or clues, which is considerably more difficult” (McGuinness. The letters remain visible while they are being decoded. Decoding, or reading, involves recognition memory, memory with a prompt. ”Reading and spelling are reversible processes and should be taught in tandem so that this reversibility is obvious…but they draw on different memory skills. The idea is to teach these skills to the point of automaticity.” ”In the early grades at least, I’m a big fan of combining phonics and spelling instruction. Spelling and decoding are taught alongside each other in all high-quality phonics programmes, from the very beginning of instruction, to make clear the reversibility of the code and to ensure that pupils’ encoding and decoding abilities remain as close as possible in synchrony, avoiding the development of a serious spelling lag. “We are fond of saying “practice makes perfect,”…But it is more accurate to say that practice makes permanent.” (italics added. How not to teach spelling – familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. ”Inventive spelling ensures that students become great at spelling incorrectly” Mistakes are not routinely corrected as the assumption is that children will learn ‘naturally’ to make closer and closer approximations to correct spelling (Hempenstall). Children are unlikely to learn to spell accurately with this method. Whole-language philosophy expects children to discover how to spell for themselves. See Early Reading Instruction pp250->265 for McGuinness’ dismantling of the various developmental (stage) spelling theories. ”Saying there are developmental stages in spelling is a bit like saying there are developmental stages in learning to cook, fix a car or program a computer” However, writing (spelling) is a recent human invention, not part of our biologically-based primary development and therefore cannot be properly acquired except through teaching.Įducation isn’t natural – that’s why it’s hard It’s commonly assumed that learning to spell follows biologically-determined developmental stages e.g. If he had done that, he would have created a transparent alphabet, and this would have changed everything.” (Diane McGuinness. ”Johnson may have succeeded in standardizing the spelling of words, but he failed to standardize the spelling of phonemes. If Johnson had formally allocated a single, unique spelling to each of the English phonemes, instead of fixing the spelling of individual words, thereby creating a transparent English alphabet code, we would not have the difficulties with English reading and spelling that we do today. ![]() You can see such variable spelling in Shakespeare’s original scripts for example. They would often spell the same word in different ways in the same piece of writing and this was considered perfectly correct. Before the arrival of Johnson’s dictionary, people spelt phonetically ‘by ear’. It was the construction of the first major dictionaries by Dr Johnson (1755) and later Noah Webster that set the ‘correct’ spelling of individual words all but in stone. Scroll down for a list of Teaching Spelling DOs and Don’ts
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