Spotlight on misspelling

wh-wordslide

In her second post for Cambridge Conversations, Fun for author Anne Robinson looks at how we can help young learners with their spelling.

Look at these misspelt words: telefone, straigth, wich

Why are the words telephone, straight and which often misspelt? There could, of course, be various reasons, but here are some suggestions.

ph
Look at this sentence: My friend’s phone takes great photos. The words friend, photo and phoneall contain the sound /f/ but in photo and phone, the sound is written with the letters ‘p-h’. In some languages, these words are written with an ‘f’: e.g. foto in Spanish.

ght
There is no spelling-sound relationship here. We don’t ‘hear’ the ‘g’ or the ‘h’ in straight. Also, other words in English (bath, length) have the letters ‘t’ and ‘h’ in a different order.

wh
Again, we don’t hear the ‘h’ in words like which or white. And other words like water or wind are written without an ‘h’.

How can we help?
By making posters of words that share spelling patterns.
(And illustrating them at the same time, if we can, like I’ve done below).
By training students to notice common letter combinations and where they appear. 
Does the letter combination ‘ght’ start words? (No – it appears at the end of words or syllables!) And for this combination, g-h-t, the trick is to write the letters in alphabetical order! What about the letter combinations ‘wh’ and ‘ph’? Do these letters occur together at the start of words or syllables, at the end, or both?

Key

• wh appears at the start of words. Question words (apart from ‘how’) start with these letters (why, where, who, etc) We call these ‘wh’ questions and that name is perfect! Most other words DON’T have an ‘h’ (e.g. well, winter)
• ph appears at the start AND end of words and syllables, e.g. photograph, phone, dolphin, elephant

After analysing these patterns, we can then practise these spellings. With younger learners, you could make a question word slide like the one in the photo above the title. You can use this for various activities:

1. The teacher or a student says a question word. All the students slide to the letters to make the correct word.
2. Students listen to questions and slide to the letters to make the question word they heard.
3. In pairs, or small groups, one student slides the letters to make a question word. Their partner or another student in the group has to ask them a question with that word.

Again, making these patterns VISUAL helps. Look at the ph- poster above. Notice the colours I’ve chosen and the shapes of the letters in dolphin, elephant, and geography. You could get students to say sentences with ‘ph’ and ‘f’ spellings in them. For example: I’m taking a photo of my and my friend with my phone!’ I’m taking a selfie! As they say the words photo and phone, they draw the letters ‘ph’ in the air. As they say friend and selfie, they draw an f in the air. English spelling is famously difficult. By training students to notice spelling patterns, to group similarly spelt words together in a memorable, visual way and to use the words, we can hopefully help them avoid the misspelling trap!