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Spelling Blues
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Spelling Blues



May 11, 2016

I have been teaching level 4 for the past two cycles and I struggle to improve the students’ spelling. Even though I stress how important spelling is in their IELTS exam, they still consistently spell certain words wrong. According to the Cambridge Learners’ Corpus, these words are the most commonly misspelled words in Cambridge exams:

accommodation, advertisement, beautiful, because, beginning, believe, bicycle, comfortable, communicate, convenient, embarrassing, especially, received, sincerely, which.

In cycle 4 I was determined to help out those students who are really struggling with English spelling. I’ve tried different tactics but I found it most useful to make spelling as visual as you can to help students visualize words and their shapes. Good spellers can ‘see’ words in their heads. Weak spellers need help with this.

As you have probably noticed, it is the spelling of vowels that creates most difficulties for Arabic students. I found an interesting idea on Johanna Stirling’s Spelling Blog. It is a system for coloring vowels to make them visually salient in difficult words.

vowels

To start off, write the five vowel letters and the names of the colors on the board: blue, bright red, green, grey, yellow. Ask students to match the letters to the colors. Suggest that they match them by rhyme: a is grey, e is green, i is bright red, o is yellow and u is blue. Then make a poster in class with the words that students often misspell, for example:

vowels2definitely

because

similar

about

In the last few weeks of Cycle 4 I finally started seeing some good results. Students often looked at the posters in class for the correct spelling of words. They started adding words to the posters on own volition and in the last task 2 assignments there wasn’t a single student who misspelled ‘because’.

 

Stirling, J. (2003). Remedial Spelling in EFL. Johanna Stirling’s English Language Garden

May 11, 2016
Lesson Plans & Ideas, Teaching & Learning