Topic: Teaching Spelling

10-second review: Do teachers understand how to teach spelling? Even though they use standard spelling basals, most teachers do not understand how to teach spelling. Source: MT Fresch. Research in the Teaching of English (November 2004), 189. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

10-second review: What do we know about having difficulties with spelling? 85% of our words are spelled regularly. The difficulty has risen because the 15% that are spelled irregularly are used 85% of the time. Source: GL Jackson & AM Guber. “The Way Out of the Spelling Labyrinth,” 94.

Comment: I don’t know if the authors’ statistics are accurate, but they certainly seem to match my own experience.

The typical spelling lesson in school is a bore. Typical lesson plan: Memorize a list of words. Use each word in a sentence. Write each word ten times. Take the test on Friday. Often the list of words has no point. At the very least, the words should be difficult to spell for some reason. The next thing the teacher needs to do is show the students how to remember those difficult-to-spell words.

Most spelling texts emphasize sounding out words when poor spellers really need to learn how to visualize the spelling of troublesome words.

Harry Shefter was a professor at New York University. He wrote a book called Six Minutes a Day to Perfect Spelling. He suggested a number of techniques that I did not find helpful. But two techniques seemed to work well with my students.

If a word is hard to spell, it’s often because, most likely, the vowel is a schwa, meaning you can’t tell whether it is a, e, i, o, or u. Take “secretary” for instance. We tend to pronounce it sec-ra-tary. Shefter suggests blowing up the trouble spot: SECRETary. Then he adds a silly little sentence to help remember the trouble spot: “A SECRETary can keep a SECRET.”

Shefter gives example after example of words that are hard to spell: believe, receive, supersede, proceed, succeed, exceed, accede, intercede, helpful (the –ful is misspelled –full); argument (misspelled often as “arguement”); cEmEtEry (“ ‘EEE!’ she screamed as she passed the cEmEtEry.”); sacrilegious, and so on.

Pick up a copy of the book. You can find it on Amazon.com. Shefter shows you how to visualize words that are frequently used and hard to spell. When I used his techniques, my students in grades 9, 10 and 11 loved them and spelling became even fun.

It is my belief that in teaching English, there are many student mistakes that a teacher can predict. Don’t wait for them to happen. Help them correct the mistakes before they happen. RayS.