Spelling Help: Help for Spelling Problems

The ability to spell correctly is one of the fundamentals that will never cease to be important. Not only can spelling problems cause problems at school, but the ability to spell is nearly essential for adult employment.

The advantage of a good spelling ability in the work place was indicated by a survey of 1500 employers and employees, recently conducted by Office Angels, UK’s leading secretarial and office support recruitment consultancy. This survey revealed that a full 84% of employers believe that the value of even the most excellent work can be debased by sloppy spelling and grammar. It further showed that 77% of employers regard a high degree of literacy as an essential skill, and that employees who demonstrate attention to detail are more likely to be on the fast track to promotion. Work peppered with sloppy spelling and grammar left 20% of employers fuming, while 53% perceived the employee as lazy and unprofessional. The same percentage of managers — 53% — admitted that they would not read any further once they had spotted literacy errors.

HOW TO IDENTIFY SPELLING PROBLEMS

The signs or symptoms below indicate that a child has a spelling problem and therefore needs help:

• One of the most obvious — and a common — telltale signs is reversals. Children with this kind of problem often confuse letters like b and d, or they sometimes write words like rat for tar, or won for now.
• Another sure sign, which needs no confirmation by means of any form of testing, is elisions, that is when a child writes cat when the word is actually cart.
• He may write the letters of a word in the wrong order, like left for felt, or the syllables in the wrong order, like emeny for enemy.
• He may spell words as they sound, for example rite for right.
• He may spell bizarrely, for example substance spelled ‘sepedns’, last spelled ‘lenaka’, about spelled ‘chehat’, may spelled ‘mook’, did spelled ‘don’, or to spelled ‘anianiwe’. These words bear little, if any, relation to the sounds in the words.

FIND THE CAUSE TO FIND A CURE

Successful intervention is dependent on finding the cause or causes of a problem. Most problems can only be solved if one knows their causes. A disease such as scurvy claimed the lives of thousands of seamen during their long sea voyages. The disease was cured fairly quickly once the cause was discovered, viz. a Vitamin C deficiency. A viable point of departure in this case would thus be to ask the question, “What causes spelling problems?”

To fully understand the cause of spelling problems it is important to take note of the fact that there is nothing that any human being knows, or can do, that he has not learned. If you dump a little puppy into the water, it will swim. Do the same with a human child, and it will drown. The child must learn to swim.

There is yet another, equally important fact, which is also a sine qua non towards the understanding of spelling problems, and which has also so far been overlooked, viz. that learning is a stratified process. This is a self-evident fact, yet its significance in the situation of the child with a spelling problem has apparently never been fully comprehended. Throughout the world in all educational systems it is commonly accepted that a child must start at the lower levels of education and then gradually progress to the higher levels. If human learning had not been a stratified process, if it had taken place on a single level, this would have been unnecessary. It would then not have been important to start a child in first grade. It would have been possible for the child to enter school at any level and to complete the school years in any order.

A simpler example to illustrate the stratified nature of learning is the fact that one has to learn to count before it becomes possible to learn to add and subtract. Suppose one tried to teach a child, who had not learned to count yet, to add and subtract. This would be quite impossible and no amount of effort would ever succeed in teaching the child these skills. In the same way, there are also certain skills and knowledge that a child must have acquired first, before it becomes possible for him to benefit from a course in spelling.

Audiblox is a system of cognitive exercises, aimed at developing and automating the skills that are required in reading, spelling, writing, mathematics and the skills required in the learning of subject matter:

• Concentration.
• Perception — visual, auditory and haptic.
• The ability to discriminate, synthesize and analyze in terms of foreground-background, form, size, position in space/time and color.
• Memory — short and long term, visual and auditory.
• The ability to decode, integrate and classify information.
• Imagination.
• Concept of numbers.
• Fine and gross motor coordination.

By addressing these foundational skills, spelling problems can be overcome — and prevented.

SPELLING HELP FOR SPELLING PROBLEMS: SUCCESS STORIES

When he had a spelling test every Friday, he would study all week and still score only about 30 percent. With Ruaan being in third grade in one of the top schools in the country, his parents were convinced that he would have to be taken out and sent to a specialist school. As an interim measure, they decided to try the Audiblox program. After only four months there was a remarkable improvement in Ruaan's reading and comprehension. To his delight, he was scoring high marks even for unprepared spelling tests. Read more...

“We began using Audiblox (spelling program) 6 months ago, and the results have been just stunning. Within a month, she was able to remember how to spell a few words, and then just like a baby learning to talk, she began to experience a rapid snowball effect. A few months after we began using Audiblox, she said as we were driving around on errands – ‘Mom, I think I know how to spell library.’ And she did! And this was not an isolated moment, only the first. She is now almost an intuitive speller. Really, it's a miracle. Six months ago, her spelling tested at a Kindergarten level, and is now at a 6th grade level. This is just still so amazing to all of us who have struggled with her. Read more...