Learner Asking for Help with Spelling

Hello colleagues, An Arabic-speaking student asked me recently if I could teach him how to write. After some back and forth in our conversation, I realized that what the student wanted was to understand how to spell words when writing.

As we all know, spelling and pronunciation are challenging in English. How do you help learners improve their English spelling? Do you have materials you rely on to teach spelling? Do you focus on certain spelling rules? Could you recommend any online resources for teachers and/or for learners to use independently? Thanks for any ideas you can offer.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP

Comments

Here is a list of Elaine Kirn's works for teaching and learning spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary. They work. The University of Washington, Oregon has used "Phonic&Spelling Workbooks, Basic & Practical Everyday Spelling" with available Audio CD successfully with its Summer Intensive students. Marsha Chan, The Pronunciation Doctor, has used them extensively over many years in her Community College classes. They are also our Amazon best sellers. 

Included are Teacher Resource(s), Games, Flash Cards, and Activities.

EVERYTHING to Know (Now) about Phonics & Spelling Instruction
Initial Consonants, Basic & Beginning Card Packs (Phonic&Spelling)
Initial Consonants, Intermediate & Advanced Card Packs (Phonic&Spelling)
Rhyming Words, 12 Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced Card Decks  A-L (Phonic&Spelling)
Vowel Sounds & Spellings, Beginning to Advanced 60-, 80-, 88-Card Packs (Phonic&Spelling)
Bingo, 32 (x 10) Basic, Beginning, Intermediate, & Advanced Games (Phonic&Spelling)
Puzzle Tear-Off Pad, Basic Through Advanced, in Development (Phonic&Spelling)
Phonic&Spelling Workbooks, Basic Everyday Spelling & Practical Everyday Spelling
Picture This! Picture This Too! Two Reproducible Vocabulary-Puzzle Books (Phonic&Spelling)
Ways with Words: Reproducible Vocabulary Puzzles (Phonic&Spelling)
WHAT’S THE WORD? Using New Vocabulary in the Real World, WorkText (Phonic&Spelling)

Contact us, or buy (for less than Amazon prices) on our website. 

Arthur Rubin, 310-251-3931, info@worklifeenglish.com

www.2learn-english.com

Also: www.worklifeenglish.com

 

The spelling of English is terrible and thwarts its usage http://justpaste.it/spellingenglish   The better spelled languages follow the alphabetic principle that letters stand for sounds consistently.  English does not but it has been done for US English with truespel phonetics.  Truespel is based on phonics so it uses most optimal spellings for each sound.  Learn how to spell each sound and you can spell any word you hear phonetically in US accent, even accents.  Writing English this way makes one phonemically aware with the result usually close to traditional spelling.  This is good even for teaching kindergarten kids who crave to write phonetically  http://bit.ly/2uzVs8t .  Truespel can be learned in an hour  Ttutorials are free with a free  two-way converter at http://truespel.com 

Thanks for sharing these valuable LINCS resources, Josh. These materials are useful for working with many students and could possibly be adapted for English learners, but I think it would take some effort to adapt these lessons for beginners. In fact, I have often devoted time each week in a beginning class to teaching spelling patterns. I have drawn upon the work of our Minnesota colleague Marn Frank. You can read a description and access Frank's Teaching Analogy Phonics in the LINCS Resource Collection.

The student who asked this week for help with spelling speaks Arabic. His request reminded me of an article I came across some time ago,"Spelling it Out! Accounting for Spelling Difficulties for Arab Learners of English" by Helen Brown. Brown emphasizes that teaching spelling patterns to Arabic speakers is essential since these learners often do not attend to sounding out words. Helping them to recognize syllables and to learn the short vowel sounds is likely to be beneficial. The student's request for help reminds me that I should set aside some class time to address this need.

I'm eager to hear from other teachers who are working on teaching spelling. Please let us know about your challenges, questions, and successes.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP

 

 

A couple other "spelling" resources:

Words their Way is an excellent resource book for teaching spelling and decoding patterns.  It's worth the buy just for the appendices which list words with different spelling patterns based on their frequency of use.

If you're looking for a textbook series.  Megawords is good as well.  But in most contexts diving into that whole series is more work that you want to do on that one topic.

As part of my course, I teach spelling to intermediate and advanced students using a method I call bilingual and phonetic. Below is the introduction to an essay I wrote and which serves as a basis for my approach:

LEARNING TO SPELL IN ENGLISH
by Paul Rogers, 2005

     Good writing in English should begin with good
spelling. Although advances in technology have given
us "Spell Check", it is my opinion that learning to spell well is an important “ingredient”  to a "command" of the English language.
      However, learning to spell correctly is difficult even for native English speakers. English words are too often not spelled the way in which they are pronounced, primarily due to the fact that English is a mixture of other languages, such as German, French, Spanish, and … who knows?
     One key factor is that learning to spell depends upon good pronunciation: 

"The most effective way to improve spelling is to improve pronunciation?"
(Reference Manual For The Office, by Clifford R. House
and Kathie Sigler, 1989, Southwest Publishing Company,
Cincinnati, Ohio.)
     For EFL/ESL students, difficulties in pronunciation are compounded by the fact that it is frustrating to learn how to reproduce certain English sounds which do not exist in their native languages. And this problem, in turn, leads to an inability to hear and understand many words when spoken out loud.

     To “solve” all of the above complications, I have developed a phonetic system to learn English as a Foreign language, and include a variety of lessons and exercises to help students “master” English as easily as possible. My material is bilingual, Spanish/English, but can be used by other students as well.

For the complete document: go to SPELLING, at the bottom of https://www.inglesconprofepablo.com/la-gramatica-ingles---indice

 

Thanks for explaining your approach and linking us to your document and your webpage. You've designed so many useful materials to support English learners. We appreciate your sharing your work with us here on LINCS!

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition

 

 

Romance languages make it easy to spell compared to those hoping to learn to spell correctly in English, especially if they speak Arabic as a native language. The resources shared here are wonderful and have many applications. Thanks, one and all!

This is my approach. English does have phonetically-spelled words. I would start there: minimal pairs, lots of fun dictations of short and long vowels, and voiced or unvoiced consonants. Along the way, I would also slowly introduce the list of common sight words in English. Of course, the most used words in English are sight words, which got that way from being used so often by so many! Dolch, of course, is the Prince of Sight Words. The following site lists his  100 most common sight words in our language. https://www.nala.ie/tutors/top-tips/teaching-reading/common-words 

Sight words just have to be practiced until the come naturally. There are umpteen rules for spelling words that are not phonetically spelled. Oh my goodness! Why go there? Poor students. On the other hand, if learners just practice reading and writing sight words, well, they'll know them by sight! 

So here's a good little recognition of how we learn skills: we learn by doing things over and over until we know them...AND... we do things over and over when we like doing them! So I like to find ways in which students like yours, Susan, can practice sight words in ways that are fun as they also practice phonetic spellings. How about games? There are dozens of online games that reinforce sight words. How about cloze exercises using jokes or word problems, or contexts that the student enjoys? And, of course, Language Experience is a fantastic tool for engaging students in reading, writing, and spelling, using their own words to practice. Those student passages will be filled with both types of spellings, and students will know their meanings because they came from them.

That's my take. Get away from textbooks and get to the student. Good luck.  Leecy

Hello colleagues, Thanks Leecy for your suggestions here and for emphasizing a focus on sight words. Finding ways to teach spelling that is engaging is definitely the way to go. I came across Sandy Millin's blog, which features an article "Arabic Students and Spelling" by specialist Emina Tuzovic,  that focuses on the needs of Arabic speakers and includes useful teaching strategies as well as recommended spelling games, some of which are online. Online games can be useful; however, the author notes that practicing spelling through handwriting is important.

One of the exercises recommended by Tuzovic is the Look, Cover, Write, Check method. The article links to an online game for students to practice using this approach, which looks pretty cool since you can create your own list of words to practice.

In searching out more information about the Look, Cover, Write, Check method, I located this How to Spell video on a similar technique, the Look, SAY, Cover, Write approach (We should add CHECK to this!), which is done with paper and pencil. Notice that the steps here also expect students to SAY the word they are learning to spell. I like this activity since students benefit from including as many modalities as possible, and --of course-- learners need lots of practice pronouncing words. Plus, all students can practice spelling at home using this approach with the words they are learning to spell. We can also incorporate this quick activity in the classroom. I plan to start on Monday and will also encourage students to practice at home.

Your reactions and thoughts as well as additional suggestions are welcome!

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition

 

 

Susan - the spelling guide for Arabic students is very good, and I am going to study it to use it to assist some of my Arabic students on WhatsApp. I would greatly appreciate input concerning resources like this for speakers of other languages. I can then make a list to add to the Drop-In center proposal, and the more ideas the better.

 

Hello colleagues, I tried the Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check spelling activity with students this week, and I see real benefits. I chose words that were included in our lesson such as business, vegetables, schedule, physician. We are focusing on only 2 or 3 words a day, which only takes a few minutes of class time. Plus, I am encouraging students to use this method to study words at home, too.

Here are the steps:

  1. I display the word.
  2. I read the word aloud and students repeat. (Students may want to practice saying the word a few times.)
  3. Students look at the word and study the spelling.
  4. I cover the word.
  5. Students write the word from memory.
  6. I display the word again, and students check their spelling. They correct any mistakes.

It would be great to hear from teachers who have used this method or other methods to support students with spelling.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP

Susan and all,

I was reminded of your questions about spelling for Arabic speaking students while I was working on my ESL Links page. Many of my Arabic speaking students find spelling challenging as well. I don't have any easy solutions, but will share my links for spelling from my ESL Links page. (It's the 5th topic down.) It nowhere near covers all that's available for spelling, so I would appreciate it if others shared links for students as well.

Dorothy Taylor