I’m often asked about the value of on-line and computer based programs for students that are having difficulty with reading and spelling. Although there is definitely a place for some of these programs, I believe that at this stage of technological development, you can’t replace human interaction and feedback. Every mistake a student makes is […]
The suffixes ‘-ant’ and ‘-ent’ are added to words to form a noun to indicate a ‘person who’ or ‘thing that’ (e.g., an ‘assistant’ is a person who assists, a ‘president’ is a person who presides). They are also added to words to form adjectives describing a state or quality (e.g., stagnate – stagnant, persist […]
If you are not a particularly good speller, the more spelling rules you know and understand, the better your spelling becomes because it gives you a framework to determine the most likely spelling of a word and this is supported by a growing body of research (see the references below). Yes, […]
When you hear /l/ at the end of a word with more than one syllable, it is often difficult for children to know whether to write ‘l’, ‘ll’, ‘le’, ‘el’ or ‘al’. However, with some orthographic knowledge it is possible to deduce which is the most likely letter combination. ‘ll’ is most commonly used at […]
Look-Cover-Write (or for many students GUESS) is a spelling strategy commonly used to teach spelling. However, research recently published by Dymock and Nicholson (2017) showed that students who were taught spelling using a rule-based approach had greater transference to spelling new words compared to students who were taught using look-cover-write-check, and this was true for […]