Chip, cheap, ship, sheep - remembering the spelling

Words that sound similar, especially to learners of English, can be a nightmare to spell.

A colleague in Algeria wrote that his young students mix up the spelling of the words chip, cheap, ship and sheep. If you're a native speaker of English you might think that the only problem here is the two different ways of spelling the long e sound in cheap and sheep. Otherwise the sounds tell you how to spell them, don't they?. But if you're a learner of English as a foreign language, you may well not be able to hear or produce the two different vowel sounds in ship and sheep. And the same difficulty is common with the different consonant sounds in ship and chip. So that's where phonics falls down for learners of English.

So let me try to help.

If we can't rely on sound for spelling these words, perhaps we can find something in the meaning to help. But that's usually easier with longer words. So I had to get a bit creative with these.

Linking the meaning with a photographic image of the letter.

Using synonyms to remember those two vowels

Using the word shape linked to the meaning 

Using drawn images to remember the vowels

You'll notice that:

• there are lots of different ways to help learners remember
• visual images stick in most people's memories
• linking meaning with spelling gives learners a hook to hang the spelling on
• this is a great way to differentiate between two (or more) similar words that cause spelling problems
• I can't draw! It's true I'm rather embarrassed about these drawings - particularly those sheep! - but in fact here I think it's an advantage because it makes them funnier and it shows people (teachers and learners) that they don't have to be artists to be able to do this. I'm most certainly not!
  

Teachers! Parents! People who find spelling hard! 

I invite you to try it yourselves with words your learners / your children / you can't spell or confuse. 

Start by identifying the problem part in the word. Think about the whole word shape and think about the shape of those tricky letters, but always think about the meaning too and try to make a link. Can you make a visual link between the spelling and the meaning? 

Try out some different ideas - just the thinking and drawing will help memory, so it works best if the person who is having the spelling difficulty does it himself or herself or you do it together. The images can then be displayed as a reminder if necessary - but remove the display as soon as possible so the memory needs to do a bit of work. 

Please share your images with us in my Flickr group:  https://www.flickr.com/groups/spellingimages/

And please, feel free to tell others about this Flickr group, this blog, this idea and/or my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thespellingpage

Looking forward to seeing your pictures!

Johanna

 .

"What Teachers Should Know About Spelling" article

I am grateful to Megan, an Australian follower of The Spelling Blog, for pointing me to this summary of what seems like a very interesting talk by Dr Misty Adoniou about teaching spelling. Her ideas are similar to mine in many ways but have some really interesting variations. To summarise the summary(!):

• Phonics and visual skills are not the most important indicators of being a good speller
• English is morpho-phonemic (based on meaning as well as sound) and etymology (word origin) plays a large part, so these two aspects should be explicitly taught across the curriculum (if taught in English, of course)
• We need to teach 6 types of knowledge about words to spell them well: meaning, sound, acceptable and typical letter patterns, origins, parts of words and remembering what words look like.
• We should teach spelling strategies through words that learners meet in context  in real books rather than having lists of words to learn that illustrate a strategy.

All sounds very sensible to me. Read the whole article here: http://www.atesolact.org.au/recent-atesol-act-events.html#a1377 - now here: http://www.atesolact.org.au/events/past-atesol-act-events/#Spelling2013 

Thank you, Misty, Megan and Tina Williamson, the summary author. More about Misty Adoniou

Johanna

Winner of the International Literacy Day competition

And we have a winner! 

September 8th was International Literacy Day. To raise awareness of this I ran a competition to win a copy of my book, Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners. The winner is .... Fitta Astriyani from Indonesia. Fitta says she and her colleagues have not been able to find up-to-date books about teaching English spelling in Indonesia and her students certainly need help in this area. Fitta has a great blog herself - take a look at all the fun and creativity at http://funkreatifittaz.blogspot.co.uk/. So congratulations Fitta - your book will be with you soon!

Everyone else who entered will soon get a voucher for discount on the book. 

But let's get back to the reason for the competition - raising awareness of literacy around the world. Here are some facts:

There are about 775 million illiterate adults in the world (nearly 16% of the global population) and nearly three quarters of them are in just ten countries. By far the largest number come from India, but it does not have the highest percentage of illiterate adults. According to the CIA Factbook, the country with the lowest number of literate adults is Burkino Faso with only 21.8%. 

In Afghanistan, the rate is slightly higher (28%) but it has the lowest rate of female adult literacy: only an unbelievable 12.6% (in 2000). We know that female literacy is crucial to the development of future generations.

But it's not all bad news. Literacy rates are increasing now. According to Unesco, between 1990 and 2011, the adult literacy rate in the Arab States rose from 55% to 77% and the youth literacy rate from 74% to 90%. South and West Asia also saw very welcome improvements.

International Literacy Day 2013 - Win a free book!

It's the UNESCO International Literacy Day on Sunday 8th September 2013.

Competition!
To celebrate I am offering a free copy of Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners to the person who convinces me they deserve it most! And a discount voucher to everyone else who enters the competition following the rules below.

All you have to do is email me at johanna(dot)stirling@gmail.com

• before midnight (GMT+1) Sunday 8th September -  not after please
• say why you deserve a copy of Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners more than anyone else
• The Subject of your email must be "ILD13 Competition"

The winner will get a free copy of the book (Recommended Retail Price £18.50) posted to them free of charge, wherever they are in the world. 

Remember you can't lose! Even if you don't win the book, you get the discount voucher just for bothering to enter. But it must be no later than Sunday 8th September 2013.

Global literacy - did you know?

Thankfully literacy rates worldwide are improving all the time but there are still millions of children who don't go to school or who are leaving primary school unable to read or write. Two thirds of the illiterate people in the world are female.

Literacy infographic here

Is our spelling really getting worse?

I read so many people bemoaning the fact that our spelling is getting worse. And most seem to blame technology. I'm not sure that our knowledge of spelling is getting worse and I don't think technology is solely to blame if it is.

The fact is that we write far more than we ever used to (and I think that's a good thing!). And also much of what we write is for public consumption. So of course mistakes are seen more. We are also ridiculously 'busy' with constant distractions, so the main problem seems to be that we don't take time to check what we've written. Even people who are complaining about other people's spelling let themselves down. I read this today:

 "Myself, i HATE to see spelling errors in texts that are supposed to have been proff-read."

It's spell checkers that get singled out for most of the blame. I was sent an article on the subject today that I really want to respond to. So I'm going to!

You can read the article Technology Spell Check Leaves Many Adults Unable To Spell here or just read me ranting about it below.

The article starts off by claiming:

Technology has left many Britons unable to spell words like "definitely" and "separate", a survey has found. It suggests that the UK has produced an "auto-correct generation" that relies on computer spell checks. The poll, which questioned more than 2,000 adults, found that around a third could not spell "definitely" while a similar proportion failed to pick the right spelling of "separate". And around two thirds (65%) picked a wrong spelling for "necessary" from a list that did not include the right spelling.

First objection: Lots of people couldn't spell 'definitely' and 'separate' long before computers were around. I remember only learning to spell 'definitely' when I realised it contained the word 'finite'.

Second: spell checkers and auto-correct are different things. The spell checker warns you that you might have spelled something wrong and encourages you to think about what you meant to write but auto-correct just changes it for you if you've written a string of letters that people often write meaning something else.

Third: I don't like their 'poll'. Asking people to choose the correct spelling when it is surrounded by wrong but plausible spellings is asking for trouble. You might automatically write 'necessary' correctly in a sentence, but when someone offers you the choice of the word with two 'c's or one 's', it makes you stop and think that maybe you were wrong. It plants the seed of doubt. So that's bad enough but here the list didn't even include the right spelling, so it sounds like people were tricked. By the way if you can't remember how to spell the word 'necessary', remember "It's necessary to have one coat (one 'c') and two socks (two 's's)".

The article goes on:

And many people are relying on spell checks - 18% said they use this all the time. Fewer than one in 10 (9%) said they never use a spell check.

Umm ... what's wrong with using a spell check? I use one all the time too. It's a good strategy to catch your typos and words you're not sure about. In fact, what worried me about this was that 82% don't use one all the time. Try it, folks, you'll like it.

Sure there are people who can't spell well - lots of them - and it's a problem. But is it really getting worse or just more obvious? Whichever, I offer two suggestions:

1) Let's not teach children that English is spelled as it sounds (phonics) as more than 50% of it isn't. Yes, they need to learn sound-to-letter correspondences, but they also need to learn about the origins of words and look at a range of strategies for coping with the complexity that is English spelling. (See Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners for ways to do this.)

2) We should all (myself included) train ourselves to pause and check what we've written before pressing the Send button. And again we need more focus on this at school - editing.

So what about you?

• Do you agree with me?
• Do you have any proof that spelling has really got worse?
• How do you feel about spell checkers?
• And auto-correct?
• And phonics?

Improving spelling - never too late: the Jim Henry Story

Jim Henry's family didn't know he was illiterate and in his early 90's (yes, nineties!) he decided he wanted to learn to read and write. He not only achieved this dream but at 98 the lobster fisherman from Connecticut,USA has just written a book about his life. Read more here: http://m.smh.com.au/world/novel-approach-to-literacy-20111230-1pfiz.html

Wow! Pretty inspiring. And a story worth remembering when you think you're getting too old to sort something out.

Have you always felt that your spelling was not good enough? Is it time to do something about it? Try these tips:

1) Read what you enjoy and are comfortable with.

2) Write just a little bit each day. It doesn't have to be long but try to get it right by using a dictionary. Use a pen, but as you come across any words you're not 100% sure about, write these in pencil. Then check them. Or if you prefer to type, turn the Autocorrect off and type the words you're not sure about in a different colour.

3) Keep a notebook (paper or digital) of words you've looked up. Look through your notebooks sometimes and try to see patterns in spelling.

4) Try to learn why words are spelled as they are. Can you relate them to another word with similar meaning? Or look at http://www.etymonline.com/ to see where the word has come from.

5) Try to learn the spelling of words you need a lot or have big problems with. Use my Look Say Cover Write and Check chart: http://thespellingblog.blogspot.com/p/downloads.html or try this great program to help you: http://www.amblesideprimary.com/ambleweb/lookcover/lookcover.html

6) Explore and follow this blog.

7) Get help from a friend, family member or teacher. But make sure it's not someone who makes you feel bad about your spelling. Perhaps you can help them with something that they're not very good at in return - it makes for a more balanced relationship.

8) Remember if a man in his 90's can learn to read and write from scratch, there's no reason why you can't work on improving your spelling.

The tips above are very general. Much more throughout the blog.

Go for it!

Johanna

Back to school - spelling rescue strategies

I want to wish teachers who return to school around now all the best with their new classes. Hopefully you're refreshed after the summer holidays and raring to go! It's the time when I always make resolutions (more logical for teachers than January). Do you?

So, is this the year that you're determined to help out those learners who are really struggling with English spelling? If so, what can you do to really help them make progress?

Here are 6 ideas:

1. Emphasise the positive! Avoid reinforcing the idea that English spelling is chaotic and unlearnable. Instead show links. Ask questions like:
• Can you think of other words with a similar spelling? Are they similar in meaning?
• Why do you think it's spelled like this?
2. Make spelling as visual as you can. Help learners visualise words and their shapes. Good spellers can 'see' words in their heads. Weak spellers need help with this.
3. Remember testing isn't the same as teaching -  consider testing less and teaching, reading and writing more.
4. Teach or remind learners about strategies for learning difficult spellings. Use the Look Say Cover Write and Check chart at http://thespellingblog.blogspot.com/p/downloads.html
5. Correct spelling mistakes in such a way that students can learn from your corrections. Copy the correct letters they have written, with dashes for the letters that are wrong.
6. Make spelling practice fun and mentally engaging. Help break down fear of words that may have built up from previous negative experiences.

To help you, and give you loads more ideas, I've put a 20% discount on my book - Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners - for a few weeks only. To get it at this price (only £14.80 + postage) you need to go to http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/teaching-spelling-to-english-language-learners/15361505. The book is also available from Amazon.co.uk at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Teaching-Spelling-English-Language-Learners/dp/1447606787 or Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Spelling-English-Language-Learners/dp/1447606787 .

Have a happy and rewarding year!

Improving spelling - whose responsibility is it?

Whose responsibility is it to see that an individual's spelling improves? Many people would say it is the teacher’s, but is it really possible to take responsibility for another person’s learning? We can do our very best to make the reasons clear, the subject engaging and the progress achievable, but the learner must take the ultimate responsibility for learning. 

Remember, you can lead a horse to water, tell it how refreshing the water is, tell a story about how the water got there, and play horsey games in the water ... but you can’t make it drink. If learners want to improve their spelling they will have to recognise that they are the agents of change.

To help learners to take responsibility for their own learning, we can try the following:

•         make it clear that we expect them to do so;

•         discuss the issues of motivation and self-study with them;

•         teach them spelling strategies that they can use;

•         provide opportunities for them to read more;

•         give them some choice in what and how they learn;

•         let them discover patterns rather than telling them;

•         make practice activities engaging and relevant;

•         show that we value the work they have done;

•         help them see their own progress - rather than compare it to the performance of others;

•         tell them that we can’t  and won’t try to force them to learn.

Learner autonomy is a complex issue and we may not succeed easily in getting some learners to take responsibility, but it’s certainly worth a try.

Lots of activities and techniques for doing the above in my book, Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners.

Anyway that's what I think. Do you agree?

Why you shouldn't marry a man who can't spell

This is awful ... but really funny. Ladies, well worth 22 seconds of your time, especially if you're considering marriage.

Animated alphabets

I've written before about Bembo's Zoo and make no apologies for mentioning it again because I love it. Though to be honest, I'm not sure how I would ever use it for teaching spelling.

From Bembo's Zoo at http://www.bemboszoo.com/

But I've just discovered another site. It may not compete with the design and beauty of Bembo's Zoo, but it has some lovely surprises. In the Poisson Rouge animated alphabet you can hover over the letters to see a word and image for that letter.

From Poisson Rouge at http://www.poissonrouge.com/abc/index.htm

That's OK, but the fun starts when you click on an image. Sometimes there's just a little animation, sometimes there's a game. In this one you match the cake ingredients to their silhouettes and then they pour into the cake tin. Finally your cake gets baked. Mind you, I've always had a problem with virtual cake - it's only virtual!

From Poisson Rouge at http://www.poissonrouge.com/abc/index.htm

I guess they would make nice little starters or rewards in primary classes if your have an interactive whiteboard or computer and projector. But I do think interactive whiteboard activities need to stimulate learners to do a bit more than that. Perhaps it's just fun for kids to play with on their own - to develop a love of letters.

Any primary teachers or homeschoolers out there - tell us what you think. Useful or not for helping with spelling? How?


Johanna

Do texting and online chatting affect spelling? Survey.

In the last post we looked at research into the extent that online chatting and texting affect spelling. Now I want to do my own research for my book. If you can spare a few minutes (less than five, honestly) please do this survey (link below).

It would be wonderful if you could also pass it on to others - especially any teenagers or children. If you are a teachers you may like to get your class to do it.

The results will be published in 'Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners', but you never know there may be a sneak preview here on the Spelling Blog - keep your eyes peeled!

And thank you very much in advance.

Click here to take survey

Do texting and online chatting affect spelling?

Nope! Research suggests that whether kids use text messaging or other types of shortened text for writing online doesn't make a blind bit of difference to their spelling.

Good spellers, weak spellers
Some small-scale research at the University of Alberta in Canada found that those who could spell well in academic contexts also spelled well on-line or on their mobiles and those that couldn't didn't.

The difference between girls and boys
They also found that girls used more short forms, like GR8, LOL, etc, whereas boys used more punctuation!!!!!!!! (like that). The article's at: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090922095814.htm

The most literate generation ever?
Interesting stuff but the study was tiny (only 40 kids). At the other end of the scale, but with similar results, some research from Stanford University was enormous, involving 14,672 bits of student writing (both academic and social). The researchers showed that young people are doing more writing than any previous generation have ever done. And significantly they are writing for a specific purpose - not just to hand in an essay because they have to. "Ah yes but...,"say the grumpy old women/men*, "...they may be writing a lot but they use so much of that dreadful texting language that they forget how to write properly." Not so, according to these researchers: in all the academic papers that they looked at they didn't find any examples at all of texting language. The research is here.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson


What do you think?
If you are a teacher or a parent, do you think SMS language affects your children's spelling? And do you think some shortened forms like u (for you) will eventually become accepted forms of English spelling?

*I don't know if grumpy old men and grumpy old women are an entirely British phenomenon or not. They are not necessarily particularly old (middle-aged) but they are certainly grumpy ... about everything - especially anything new or anyone young.

Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners

I'm so excited! I've just had the cover of my book - Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners - designed. And I want to share it with you.



Just one problem - I haven't finished writing the book! But I'm getting there.

Questions I'd like you to ask me...

So what's the book about?
Well, how to teach spelling to people who are learning English. Although it's primarily aimed at teachers of adults and teens, all the principles and most of the activities can be used with, or adapted for, children too. It starts with an examination of English spelling, how 'regular ' and learnable it really is and why some people struggle with it. Then we take a quick look at some research I've done about learners, teachers and materials. All of this helps to inform my approach to teaching spelling. The rest of the book describes this - the methodology and specifically how we can teach spelling strategies and some spelling patterns - particularly those that seem to bug our learners most.

What makes it different from the other spelling books? What spelling books? There aren't many, not for ELT. But mine moves away from a phonics approach - because

a) so much of English isn't phonetically spelt and
b) many English language learners have problems with pronunciation too.

So I deal with multi-sensory and cognitive approaches to spelling. We all learn different things in different ways, so there are loads of very different types of activities for you to use or adapt. The other difference is the focus on strategies. We can't make anyone learn to spell (just as we can't make them learn anything else) but we can show them some ways how.

Why are you writing it?
Guilt! I remember hearing myself tutting over student work and saying"You really must do something about your spelling". They would nod sadly and ask,"How?" and I had no answer. I knew just "read a lot" wasn't very helpful. So I started looking into ways to help them. Then came an MA dissertation. Then getting big and enthusiastic audiences at my presentations about spelling and requests to read the dissertation. So I decided to build on it and include lots of activities and ... here we are - well, nearly.

When will it be out?
Ah, good question! Hopefully, by the end of this year. In time for your Christmas stocking, chilly evenings or lying on the beach (depending which part of the world you are in).

What can we do to help you out?
Well, since you ask, encourage me! Tell me that this is the book you've been waiting for and that I should hurry up and get it finished and you know X number of people who want to buy it. Oh, and get someone to invite me to talk about how to teach spelling. And spread the word. And keep coming back to the blog to see how it's coming along. Thank you very much.

Thank you.
It's my pleasure!

And by the way, do you like the cover? Please leave comments.

Handwriting and spelling

Where is your memory? In your brain certainly. But it also seems to be in your muscles. When you write a very familiar word or even just a string of letters as part of a word, you don't stop and think about the spelling, your hand just does it. You have gained automaticity: that is, you do something without really thinking about it (like changing gear when driving). The great thing about automaticity is that it frees up your conscious attention for dealing with higher-level tasks. In writing this means you can be thinking about how to express your ideas rather than how to spell the words. It's what people who are learning to spell should be striving for.

So how can learners gain this automaticity when it comes to spelling? Handwriting is an important consideration. If students 'print', that is, they write each letter separately and individually, they are missing out on valuable opportunities to get the hand to remember spellings of whole words or common chunks of words (letter strings) such as '-ing' or '-tion'.

Learners from languages that are written from right to left sometimes start to write a letter on the right and work towards the left. So in the common string 'wh', they may start writing 'w' at the top right of it and then when they get to the top left of 'w' they have to skip back to the right ready to write the 'h'. All the flow from one letter to the next is thus lost. This needs to be corrected if at all possible.

In Melvyn Ramsden's Rescuing Spelling, he recommends that children are encouraged to join up their letters or at least write letters that can be joined up (i.e. they have those little tails on them - called ligatures). He suggests they should write the letters in each morpheme together, so their hand learns to automatically make that shape. So when writing '-ing' at the end of a word, the pen shouldn't leave the paper and the 'i' should be dotted last, after the 'g' has been written. He gets his children to say out loud "ing" when they dot the 'i'. Neat! I'm going to try it out with an adult English language learner who has this problem.

Here's a video I just found of Melvyn Ramsden in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aWPdObDgbU

Interesting, but I found it a bit uncomfortable to watch. What do you think? Are children taught to print or join up their writing when they start learning to write in your country?

Online Spelling Games (1)

Here are some pretty cool online games to help people learn individual spellings:

Spelling City: http://www.spellingcity.com/ Type in some words that you have trouble spelling. Make sure you get the spelling right, but the program will tell you if it doesn't recognise a word. Then it speaks the word and also puts it in a sentence for you. How clever is that! Then it teaches you the spellings: you can play a variety of games with the words or it will test you.


East of the Web: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/games/index.html has got some very addictive games for people who like playing with words.

Literacy - The Afghan Reading Project

You may be struggling to spell in English or to teach others to spell, but spare a thought for those who cannot read or write at all, and who have no books to help them. I am sure there are many places in the world where this is the case, but I read recently that in Afghanistan 90% of women and 80% of men are illiterate. I'm so shocked that I'm going to write that again in bold:

In Afghanistan 90% of women and 80% of men cannot read or write.

Just think for a minute what the consequences of such widespread illiteracy means for the people of Afghanistan and for the rest of the world.

Thinking about this led me to an organisation which looks like it does fantastic work:

The Afghan Reading Project
http://www.afghan-reading-project.org.uk/


From their website:

The Afghan Reading Project is a registered charity that aims to put books in the hands of Afghan children to inspire reading and learning. We also fund books for older students and practical resources for teachers.

ARP has funded the publication of 40,000 books, all produced by Afghan writers, illustrators and printers. The books were distributed to schools in Afghanistan and refugee schools along the Afghan-Pakistan border, meaning that thousands of children can now enjoy a range of educational and fictional texts.

Please consider supporting The Afghan Reading Project.

If you need to be persuaded of the importance of this type of education I strongly recommend reading Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin http://www.threecupsoftea.com/