Creating Learning Partners: A facilitator’s guide for training effective adult literacy tutors

Facilitation tip

You could start this activity here and complete it at the end of the unit as an opportunity for your tutors to reflect on why spelling is difficult for some people both before and after they go through a number of spelling-related exercises

Variation

To help make the point about the challenges of phonetically irregular spelling, you might want to use the “spelling test” from the next activity at this point and then return to the discussion.

Discussion
Materials and equipment Flip chart and markers Handout 8.1: Why Is Spelling so Difficult? Preparation Copy handout. Read over the brief history of the English language in the introduction to this activity, for your own information. Carefully read over step three, below. STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS Introduce the activity by stating that many adults find spelling difficult. You could also use quotations from adult learners that talk about this. Brainstorm as a group some answers to the question, “Why is spelling so difficult?” Record the answers on the flip chart. We suggest you ask tutors to record the answers on the handout Why Is Spelling so Difficult? This is important information and our experience is that, if they write it down themselves, they will remember it better. Prompt tutors, as necessary, to include most of the following concepts in some fashion. Use the history of English provided in the introduction to add information if tutors are interested in more details. English is comprised of words from many languages. The Roman alphabet was adopted for English despite the fact that it doesn’t have enough symbols for all our sounds ( 6 symbols for 4 vowel sounds and 4 consonant sounds). Spoken English never stays the same, but English spelling does. Although our pronunciation continues to change, the spelling of words gradually became static after the printing press was invented. For instance, the word daughter used to have a guttural sound like the ch in the Scottish loch where the gh is, but this sound was lost. All that remains of the sound is the spelling. Only 85 per cent of English words are phonetically regular. That is, they can be easily spelled by using the usual sound/letter relationships. Words with more syllables tend to be more phonetically regular.

Discussion

Materials and equipment

Flip chart and markers
Handout 8.1: Why Is Spelling so Difficult?

Preparation

Copy handout.
Read over the brief history of the English language in the introduction to this activity, for your own information.
Carefully read over step three, below.

STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS

Introduce the activity by stating that many adults find spelling difficult. You could also use quotations from adult learners that talk about this.
Brainstorm as a group some answers to the question, “Why is spelling so difficult?” Record the answers on the flip chart. We suggest you ask tutors to record the answers on the handout Why Is Spelling so Difficult? This is important information and our experience is that, if they write it down themselves, they will remember it better.
Prompt tutors, as necessary, to include most of the following concepts in some fashion. Use the history of English provided in the introduction to add information if tutors are interested in more details.
- English is comprised of words from many languages.
- The Roman alphabet was adopted for English despite the fact that it doesn’t have enough symbols for all our sounds ( 6 symbols for 4 vowel sounds and 4 consonant sounds).
- Spoken English never stays the same, but English spelling does. Although our pronunciation continues to change, the spelling of words gradually became static after the printing press was invented. For instance, the word daughter used to have a guttural sound like the ch in the Scottish loch where the gh is, but this sound was lost. All that remains of the sound is the spelling.
- Only 85 per cent of English words are phonetically regular. That is, they can be easily spelled by using the usual sound/letter relationships. Words with more syllables tend to be more phonetically regular.