Especially for Teachers - About English

Spelling strategies

 

Strategies for solving words

Students should be encouraged to reflect on their learning and the strategies they apply in the spelling process (metacognition). Students need to develop the language to talk about their learning. These strategies should be explicit taught and constantly referred to in the classroom.

.

How do I spell a new word? Think about meaning. Does it give you any clues to spelling patterns? Say the word slowly listen carefully. Write the word syllable-by- syllable. Make sure you have represented each sound with a letter or letters. Look carefully to see if the pattern looks right Try different patterns that might be right See if you know another word which is similar Ask yourself what it means Begin with the base word

Have-a-go strategy: Do I know this word? How many syllables can I hear? Do I know any other words that sound almost the same? How are those words written? Does this word I have written look right? I'll try it again. Does this look better? I'll write the part I am sure of and leave a blank for the difficult part. I will try different ways to fill in the blank.

Talk to yourself chart The word is...... Stretch the word..... I hear the sounds..... I see ......letters. The spelling pattern is...... The vowel says....... Another word like...... is ........

Strategies for learning new words

Brainstorm ideas children use to learn new words. Give time and practice to develop some of the following strategies.

Questions to help you learn how to spell new words: Does the meaning of the word help you with the spelling? Is it a word you can break into parts (or syllables), such as 'temp/er/a/ture'? Is it a word you can use a spelling hint (Gimmick) for, such as: 'a piece of pie', 'you hear with your ear' or 'necessary has one collar and two socks'? Does the word have other words inside it? It may be a compound word, such as 'football' or it may be a base-word with added letters, such as 'dresser'. Can you sound the word out easily? Can you change the pronunciation of the word to help you with the spelling? For example, emphasising the 'n' sound in the word 'government' would mean that you would be less likely to leave the 'n' out. Is it a word that you may just have to learn by using the Look, Say, Cover, Write and Check method?

.Brainstorm with the class the things you think make a good speller.
Place these on a chart in your classroom

Helpful hints for remembering spelling words Picture the word in your head Paint the word on your eyelids Paint the word on an easel in your head, use yellow/red Look at the word: Say the letters/sounds as you write the word Break the word into syllables Look, say, cover, write, check Look closely at the tricky parts Make a story up about the word eg was "What a surprise" Freckle words - look for the word in your reading and writing Practise the word by writing with your finger on your other hand Brainstormed by children in 1/2 class

It is not just important to teach knowledge about words but to include teaching of strategies of how to learn words. Students must be taught how to learn words and how to check spelling of words they have attempted.

More strategies for learning words:

Look Say Cover Write Check

• Look at the word
• Say the word
• Cover the word
• Write and say the word
• Check the word

(You could add another step to this)
Trace and say the word
Write the word from memory and check it.    

(Taken from Bolton & Snowball (1993) Teaching Spelling: A Practical Resource, Heinemann.)

To spell any unknown word that has not been seen before the writer may try to represent the sounds heard in the word. Beginning writers rely heavily on this strategy because they do not yet know a lot about written language. Experienced writers may use this strategy first and then try to apply other aspects they know about written language.

Example 1
The beginning writer who is aware of representing the sounds in a word may write the word said as S or SD or SED.

Example 2
An older writer who can apply many strategies may attempt an unknown word such as phagocyte as fagosite or fagasite or phagasite. Then they would apply knowledge about its meaning (a special type of blood cell), decide the spelling is more likely to be phagocyte (because other science words end with cyte) and then use a dictionary to check the correct spelling.

• Teach students that letter-sound correlation is different in different words.
  Students need to learn that:

• Teach students an awareness of onset and rime (eg tr-uck; sh-op; p-et)
  
• Sort words according to spelling patterns - strings or clusters of letters which occur in many words sharing common sound units (eg ite/ight)

• Teach children to listen to the order of sounds in a word and represent these with a letter or letters in the correct sequence. Map sounds into Word Frames or Elkonin boxes.
  If a child asks for the spelling of ‘jumped’, the teacher might prepare a frame to help the child fill in as many letters as possible.

Teachers can ask:
What is the very first sound you hear?

Do you know what letter can be used for that sound?

In which box do you think it should be written?

To develop visual strategies:

• Teach students to look for highly predictable patterns or letter sequences of English. Encourage children to make associations with words of similar patterns. Focus on sequential letter patterns. Group words that contain common patterns; eg other brother, mother, bother. Word sorting and categorising activities are useful.

• Teach students that words must not only sound right, but they must also look right
  
• Choose a high frequency word to focus on each week. Every time a child reads or writes the word they are allowed to place a coloured dot on the word. This word can also be used as a screen saver for the week.
  
  

  In this Prep/1 class the word of the week is placed on each table, so children can easily access it to place a dot.
  This child has found the word in the book they were reading.

• Identify the critical features of words whenever children are shown how to spell a word, (i.e. the most significant features in the word and the pattern) Then encourage them to write the word from memory, not by copying. See Spelling Journals

• Collect words. Regardless of sound, collect according to visual patterns. When you have a collection, you classify them according to sound or pattern.
  For example:
  'ough' or 'cracked hoped planned cried'
  double consonants 'll', 'bb', 'tt' (Try to have vowel plus consonant cluster 'ell, ill all')

Example 1
To spell a word such as somebody the writer should use knowledge about the spelling of ‘some’ and/or ‘body’ and realise that a compound word will have the same spelling because it has the same meaning base.

• Teach children word meanings and derivations; eg. graphics, graphology, telegraph or sign, signal, resign. Teach base word and its derived forms e.g. Latin 'medica': medical, medic, medicine (teach the pattern as word is tied to meaning rather than sound.)
  Ask: why is medicine spelt like the following words? medical, medico, medication. This encourages students to think about the word meanings as a problem-solving approach to working out the connections between words.

• Teach students to use morphemic knowledge, because this will also help them to recall spelling. Morphemes are units of meaning. Dissolve contains two morphemes dis and solve, and thus has a double ‘s’. Disappear only has one ‘s’ because the two morphemes are dis and appear.
  
• Practise word building - base words and prefixes and suffixes that are added to these
  
• Introduce word association — start with a word morpheme and build an ever — growing set of branches where the new word is related to the previous word
  
• Teach knowledge of word structure; eg past tense
  want-ed/ sounds id
  bang-ed/sounds d
  pick-ed/sounds t
  The common element is ed, which signals the past tense

Ask: why do all these words end with 'ed'?
How many different sounds does 'ed' represent in these words?

1. Place randomly along whiteboard; say words; ask students what "chunk" they have in common.

2. Arrange words in 4 columns as above. Ask, ‘Why have I put them in these groups?’ If students need help, say, ‘In one group the words are all for people who do something.’ ‘In another group the words are all things that do something.’

3. Explain and label the columns:

People who do something	things that do something	More	Last chunk
reporter photographer teacher	computer pointer heater	fatter skinnier greater	cover never master

4. Add other words to the appropriate columns

after winter murderer runner

richer under manger diaper

fighter heavier copier writer

winner air conditioner dish washer typewriter

Other suffixes

-tion (same applies for 'ment')

Doing verb	Thing done  noun	Last chunk
collect elect attract	collection election attraction	nation fraction vacation

-sion

Doing verb	Thing done  noun	Last chunk
confuse extend invade provide collide	confusion extension invasion provision collision	tension mission vision passion

Adapted by David Hornsby, taken from Cunningham (2000) Phonics They use Addison Wesley.

Suffix	Meaning	Example	Non-example
-ly	In that manner	happily steadily briefly	assembly family ugly
-or	Person who or Thing which	inspector generator accelerator	mirror horror
-ist	person	scientist artist	consist exist
-ance	State of/act of	tolerance ignorance	balance romance
-ment		development argument	document moment
-ness		laziness blindness	witness harness
-ant	Related to	tolerant ignorant	assistant elephant
-end		violent confident	incident urgent
-ive		creative active	motive adjective
-ous		nervous malicious	curious delicious
-al		comical memorial	animal initial

Adapted by David Hornsby, from Cunningham, P. (2000) Phonics They use Addison Wesley.

• Teach students about compound words. Try sorting compound words according to the following categories.
  
  

  B is of A (Eyebrows are brows of eyes) eg. backyard, snowflake, eardrum, milkshake

  B is from A (Sheepskin is skin from a sheep) eg. beeswax, pancake, moonlight, seaweed

  B is for A (A dustpan is a pan for dust) eg. bathroom, bookcase, playground, notebook

  B is like A (A ponytail is a tail like a pony's) eg. Batman, houseboat, grasshopper

  B is A (A pipeline is a line that is pipe) eg. gentleman, bluebird

• Provide grids for compound patterns (similar to the one illustrated), for students to develop patterns using compound words.

  
  

Sounds like (Have some of the same sounds)		Write your words	Looks like (other words are spelled the same way)
swell street	switch sweep	sweet	beet feet	swim
green keel heal		feel	peel wheel
chin leak	chest	cheek	week seek
was wind	her father	water	later
but wetter	brother	better	letter
jar lump mother		jumper	bumper

Connections can be made with meanings, as in word association.

Memory Joggers/Gimmicks/Mnemonics
Most people have difficulty remembering how to spell particular words and they devise something that will help overcome this. As students learn about memory aids and share them they may like to make a class book for the class library. Students may also record the ones they find useful in a personal spelling book.

Some useful memory aids: