A Spelling Drill
April 1st, 2006 by MarkI finally have some video from my classes I can put up here, thanks to Patrick. Here is a clip from an oral spelling drill. This isn’t rote memorization. None of the words I ask the students to spell have been previously taught; they have to use phonics rules to figure out how to spell them. I accept any phonetically equivalent spellings, since there’s no possible way for students to differentiate between them. In other words, “pound” and “pownd” would both be considered to be equivalent responses, as would “gait” and “gate”, “carpet” and “karpet”, “staff” and “staph”, etc… In my opinion, these drills are one of the main reasons my students at First Step have so much better pronunciation and so much better of a handle on phonics in general than my students at Tomcat did. It just isn’t possible for kids to make it through this curriculum and not be able to hear the difference between words like “special” and “spatial”, or “hit” and “heat”.
This class had studied at my school for a total of 4 hours per week for 5 months at the time this video was taken. On the first day of class most students couldn’t understand, “How are you?”, or tell the difference between E and A sounds. On the very first day, we did a spelling drill on words composed of only short A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s and T’s. Less than one third of the students’ answers were correct. In contrast, at the time of this video, the words they could be quizzed on included all of the letters of the alphabet, long and short vowel sounds, including “oo”, “ow/ou” sounds, “th” (voiced and unvoiced), “ch”, and “sh”. At the time of this spelling drill, the students were expected to know our school’s first 22 phonics rules.
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April 1st, 2006 at 5:51 am
Holy, FUCK!!! How do you get them to all raise their hands and try to answer like that?
April 1st, 2006 at 6:11 am
Wow, that’s really quite impressive. I don’t think most of the university students I taught could have done that with words that they didn’t already know. Their spelling knowledge seemed to be 100% rote.
Hell, I probably would have benefited from that as a kid.
April 1st, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Why does your boss let you speak Chinese? It seems really weird to have a foreigner speaking Chinese. Also, won’t you get in trouble for putting a video of class online?
April 1st, 2006 at 4:31 pm
James, I convince new students to pay attention and raise their hands in two ways. In short term, I convince them to do it for points. In the long run, I brain-wash them by giving them one or two 30 second motivational speeches every class. That’s something I’ve picked up from Ron. I’m still not quite as good at it as he is, but I’ve learned how to be a pretty good motivator.
I convince them that their English will still be bad in 10 years if they just answer when called on and then zone out for the rest of the class. I also convince them that if they listen to every single question in class, raise their hands and try to answer that they’ll improve quickly and that it will actually save them effort once they get to middle school or high school.
April 1st, 2006 at 4:46 pm
Mel, my goals are to get the students understanding and speaking as much English as possible. When Chinese saves time and helps me make more English comprehensible to the students, or gets them to use the English being practiced more quickly, I use it. Input alone won’t make students improve; they have to understand it.
I’d say that on the very first day of class, 85% of what I say is in Chinese. After six months, that’s down to about 20%; and after a year, it’s down to about 5%. I think I’ll make another post to talk about this issue.
As for my boss, he’s just focused on results. He uses Chinese in his classes, too. He’ll do whatever he thinks will make the quality of the education better, regardless of whether it’s the most popular or most profitable way. Also, he doesn’t care a bit if I blog about the school.
April 1st, 2006 at 4:55 pm
What words were they spelling, exactly? I couldn’t see the board.
April 1st, 2006 at 5:08 pm
They spelled “bit”, “bite”, “biter”, “bitter”, “gravy”, “thump”, “pill” and “meal”. They were all correct, except for one student who spelled “gravy” as “grave”.
April 1st, 2006 at 6:22 pm
yeah, i agree that it is impressive to see young kids with good command of spelling. But I really don’t like the rote element of this style of learning. I can see how it has arisen, Chinese parents and the Chinese educational system seem to be geared up to appreciate this. But while this method gives short term results, what are we doing to the long term learning of these children? After years and years of a dry rote learned education (as they will get this from Chinese school as well), what do you think their state of mind will be? Do you think they will be eager to learn? I personally believe that kids exposed to this for too long will simply burn out and their performance and enthusiasm to learn will be greatly diminished. As a teacher of 4 & 5 years olds in the UK, i love the hands on approach of the current UK curriculum at this age. They learn through exploring and practical activities. For example, rather than teach the children 3-d shapes by bringing out pictures or models and drilling them, we set up a picnic with each teddy bear or animal liking a certain shape food. We then passed around different food and asked the children which animal would like to eat them. They were exploring the different shapes, recalling the names. Also they were practising investigation skills, feeling the shape of the food, smelling it and talking about what it was like. Then you will be amazed at how many children can remember and sort these 3D objects after only a few practical experiences like this. This is the perfect way to teach very young children, but i think this practical approach shouldn’t be totally lost on older children. I realise that it is virtually impossible to teach this way in private language schools in Taiwan; its not comercially viable. However, this background makes me feel for the children involved in the Chinese/Taiwanse, hell even Asian way of education. Boring, dry; zapping all creative energies from the children. I have nothing against you Mark, and would agree that your method is a good method for what it is; but as an educator, i am always told to interest the learner; this is clearly not happening in Taiwan on the whole.
April 1st, 2006 at 8:57 pm
sorry… on the whole (and probably loads of other spelling and grammatical errors!!)
April 2nd, 2006 at 12:59 am
No problem, I changed “hole” to “whole”. If you find any other mistakes you want to change on any comments, just email me.
April 2nd, 2006 at 10:10 am
Mark-san,
Listening carefully to the English words spoken by a native speaker is a very good drill for children to develop their listening comprehension. I really envy today’s young learners of foreign languages their improved environments for studying.
When I was a student many years ago, regrettably the most part of studying English was memorizing words and sentences. There was no foreign teacher at schools, and even the time for listening to English with a tape-recorder was not enough in class.
Moreover, what was worse, my ears did not become sensitive to the sounds of English because I had been long exposed only to Japanese, which sounds are simple, when I was a child. If I were a student in your class, I would be the worst one in it.
April 3rd, 2006 at 6:14 am
Jim B,
I agree that style of teaching is great for preschoolers, but when they get to learning how to spell English (and for your kids that will be their native language, a much easier task than Mark’s kids are facing) I’m not sure there’s another way to do it.
For instance, “break” and “brake,” which ones means what? You and I know because at some point in our lives we memorized that one is spelled one way and one is spelled the other. It is, for most people, pretty easy because the input is non-stop in their native language, but it still required some memorization.
I think spelling is one of the few areas of language learning where rote memorization has merits, though even then it should be supplemented with phonics and other such systems.
April 3rd, 2006 at 8:14 am
John, you’ve hit upon why these oral spelling drills are such a tough sell for the visiting parents. Many are very concerned about their children’s spelling exams at school and they want us to cram GEPT vocab lists. Even after our students learn all our phonics rules, they’re still unsure about how to pronounce about 15% of the words in a dictionary (I pull random lists from a database). Compounding the issue is that in English (like any other language), it’s the most commonly used words that are most likely to be irregular. It just happens that “break” is one of those words that we have to teach as an exception. If I showed that word to a first semester student, he or she would pronounce it as “breek”.
As far as comprehension of “brake” vs “break” and similar words is concerned, that’s where extensive reading is great. It’s amazing how much the students’ vocabulary retention improves when they read 40 pages of English a week… even if it’s a relatively “easy” 40 pages.
I’ve had to explain to dozens of parents, that the main value of these oral spelling drills is an improved ear for the sounds and improved pronunciation. These OSDs may help the students on spelling tests, but with all the exceptions in English, they sure won’t be enough to guarantee perfect scores.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
[...] about the Dr. Seuss books I’ve used so far. Since my students have all gone done so many oral spelling drills, it’s pretty easy for them to sound out new words. With so many rhyming words, it’s [...]
September 3rd, 2007 at 5:35 am
I came across your site while searching for a method to teach my kids who have a visual-spatial impairment. I have spent countless hours teaching phonics but because of the spatial problem they will have all letters but scrambled. I started thinking maybe I should teach them to spell it outloud and that might help while writing it down.
So how do you do it–is it your own method or is there a special trick?
thanks for any advice.
danielle homeschool mom of three
September 3rd, 2007 at 7:19 am
It sounds like you may have your work cut out for you. My students are learning English as a second language, but they don’t have any sort of special impairments.
I start with just words containing a,b,c,d and t. In other words, bab, bac, bad, bat, cab, cac, cad, cat, dab, dac, dad, dat, tab, tac, tad and tat. Then, I add e and a few more consonants the next lesson. Later, I start teaching phonics rules, such as, vowel+vowel => the first vowel is long (e.g. “beat”, “boat”) and vowel+consonant+vowel => the first vowel is long (e.g. “note”, “rate”). Eventually, I teach all the letters and quite a few more spelling rules. However, I try to make sure they master each spelling exercise before moving on. It can get a little tiring going over the same simple thing again and again, but I don’t think moving on before they get is a good idea.
Good luck!