- Good readers are not necessarily good spellers. Spelling requires more attention to details and is easier for people who are more detail-oriented. Also, reading is a sight-to-sound process and spelling is a sound-to-sight process. Some people are better at processing from sight to sound and others are better at processing in the opposite direction.
- Although it would be ideal if English spelling rules were useful without exception, in fact they tend to be useful only part of the time. Some so-called rules are only useful 60 per cent of the time. There are many exceptions to the rules. For example, i comes before e except after c and in words like weir.
- Canadians sometimes spell like Americans and sometimes like the British.
Do you use color or colour?
- There are over 800,000 words in the English language. The good news is that by knowing how to spell 500 words, learners will be able to spell 80 per cent of the words they are most likely to use in writing
- We don’t write as much as we listen, talk and read so we don’t practise spelling very much. If we don’t practise new spellings within real writing situations, we won’t remember how to spell them. Taking learned spellings from an abstract context like a spelling list and using them within the context of writing, especially writing that is important to the learner, anchors the learning for many people.
- People need to hear a new spelling word, understand the word, pronounce it and read it in order to have a good basis for spelling the word. English as a Second Language learners especially need help to know a word in these ways.
- Homonyms and homophones are hard to remember. Homonyms are words that are pronounced the same, spelled the same and mean different things (like rose, the flower, and rose, the past tense of to rise). Homophones are words that are pronounced the same, spelled differently and mean different things (like hear and here).
- Dictionaries are hard to use to check spelling unless the learner can spell
the first part of the word correctly.
- Conclude by saying that tutors may want to share some of these facts with their learners if their learners are interested in the background of English spelling.
|