Assessing+Spelling

Learning to spell is important for the development of literacy for young children, a good understand of spelling words helps when it comes to writing and having other people look over your work. When teachers educate spelling the most important words which need to be taught are the high frequency words, these are used in the students writing, topic words and words which students can’t spell. || Spelling is closely related to the knowledge of phonics as it helps to recognise common sounds. Prephonic spelling is the exploring of the relationship between written and spoken language. A child may have the knowledge of how letters are written but are unsure of what order the letters go in when writing words. Semi-phonetic spelling is the stage of being able to represent one or two letters in a word; children will test with letters and will associate them with sounds. When phonetic spelling is taught children will match words perfectly from letters and sounds. When choosing words which best fit, children work from sounds, by breaking up the word. Traditional spelling shows that the beginner writer will use several different ways of finding the spelling of the word. The stage shows that there is increases of learning of words through recall learning. Independent spelling indicates that the individual child is able to use several different approaches when finding the spelling of the word. ||
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Some spelling methods which can be used to improve children’s spelling can include phonics, look and cover, word building and mnemonics. Look and cover is a method of looking at the word carefully to remember it, then covering the word to see if you can right it. Word building is the understanding how the words are made and to especially look at the bases, suffixes and prefixes. Bases are important to look at first as they give an idea about a word for example word base word fast, a suffixes of er makes the word faster. Mnemonics is a method of teaching those words which don’t have and phonic patterns or morphemic bases. || Assessing spelling ** Assessing spelling must be done by examining the errors in the reading and writing of a student. For example a student may be struggling in understanding being able to use phonics to help with spelling a word so therefore a lesson maybe need to be developed to visually show the relationships. Hill (2006, p277) mentions some activities which could help students to learn to spell, these include word sorts, wordo and word trees. ||
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Hill (2006, p217) highlights the different spelling errors, these include, //omission// of letters for example writing diferent when it is spelt different, //insertion// of letters for example fore instead of for, //reliance// of phonics for example writing kar instead of car, //transposition// of letters for example writing daed instead of dead, //confusion// letters for example using your instead of you’re, confusion between dropping e and adding ing for example writing dateing instead of dating. ||
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