Learning to spell.
Let us look at a thoroughly visual, or visuo-motor, meta-linguistic method; one you already use, perhaps. It is based on language experience, which is simply a method which uses a student’s own writing to seek relevant material with which to work (and see notes to chapter seven). This method is fundamental. It is a matter of using the student’s own work as the raw material for learning to be a confidently autonomous literate, in exactly the same way we all do. It is a matter of learning to look within oneself for the answers.
A piece of writing is looked at in two modes - first as author then as secretary (Smith 1982 and see also my notes to chapter seven). Deliberately splitting these two ways we consider our writing formalises the approach all good writers follow to correct their own work. I find it helps students enormously consciously to isolate each role and to do the work of the one in deliberate isolation from the other. To bring our target method into clearer focus, undistracted by neighbouring targets. Considering our writing solely as its author formalises our natural examination of it as artist. We consider it as writing and ask how well it does its work in terms of beauty and efficacy. We do not think at all, in this mode, about the details of our spelling or punctuation. When we reach satisfaction as author, though, we pass on to solely secretarial mode. In this mode our writing is no longer thought of in terms of aesthetic value, it is simply trawled for important or relevant secretarial errors. Ideally, it is thus trawled by the student himself and, although this process will be facilitated by a tutor in its early stages, our aim is to make it a student-driven, autonomous technique as swiftly as possible. In secretarial mode we look for secretarial detail, and only secretarial detail, for example for spelling and punctuation errors. Ideally it is the student who does this, although in the early days the technique may have to be demonstrated and facilitated by a tutor. This secretarial examination ot writing should be done with a light hand. It is not always necessary, and may be neither useful nor kind, to pick up every error. In particular, writing, in any colour, on student’s work is just depressing. The only spelling errors which should be pulled out for work are those which involve common or relevant spellings or spelling ideas or principles and which can be immediately dealt with. It is perfectly acceptable, in the classroom, to ignore errors which there will be no time to consider, or which are irrelevant or rare. Such errors need not even be pointed out.
Some object to the looseness, the apparent indiscipline, of the language experience approach. It amounts, after all, to working only on whatever happens to turn up, and not necessarily even all of that. Some claim that some letter patterns (vowel digraphs, for example) are so important that they should simply be taught as such, without explicit reference to any student writing or classroom event, using material imported into the learning situation from without (e.g. Hornsby & Shear 1980). I reply that if these patterns really are common they will turn up shortly and will then be dealt with if necessary, and if they don’t turn up they weren’t that common, were they? Students are so motivated by learning exactly those spellings they demonstrably need to learn, because they spelled them wrong themselves and proved this, that language experience wins every time as a general methodological approach. Students own the material. They assuredly do not own the vowel digraph worksheet. Language experience also teaches what we seek, namely confident autonomy. It’s nothing more than the way we do it ourselves. The method, however, suffers, politically, from being somewhat unruly; not lending itself well to planning or to measurement. You may have to be creatively subversive.
How does it work in practice? The student, ideally, working in ‘secretary’ mode, finds a spelling involving, let us initially say, a common letter pattern which is both wrong and relevant. If this is to be learned (there may be too many errors for one session so we may leave some errors unremarked) we will use the LCWC / SOS method for the learning of common letter patterns. I insist on this method for such learning. It delivers faster and more secure learning than any other method I have used or seen. It is readily understood by the student, and become their own very quickly. It is a visuo-motor method, involving eye and hand. It eschews the sounds of words, concentrating on letters, letter names and letter patterns. The LCWC method is, of course, the justly famous Fernald ‘Look - Cover - Write - Check’ method. SOS refers to the not quite so famous Gillingham & Stillman method of ‘Simultaneous Oral Spelling’. The SOS method is briefly described and assessed in Kirk 1983 pp. 247 – 250.