UNIT 10

TOPIC 10
DESCRIPTION OF THE ENGLISH SPELLING.
SOUND — SPELLING CORRESPONDENCES.
TEACHING THE VISUAL WRITING SKILLS.
SPELLING IN WRITING ACTIVITIES.
0. INTRODUCTION
1. DESCRIPTION OF THE ENGLISH SPELLING.
Diachronic Study.
Synchronic Study.
2. SOUND-SPELLING CORRESPONDENCES.
Vowels
Consonants
Important Morphemes
Silent Letters.
3. TEACHING THE VISUAL WRITING SKILLS.
Grammatical Skills.
Stylistic Skills.
Rhetorical Skills.
Organisational Skills.
Graphical Skills.
4. SPELLING IN WRITING ACTIVITIES.
Advantages of using games in the classroom.
Games used in Writing Skills.
Writing activities.
5. PROPOSAL FOR THE DIDACTICS OF THE WRITING CODE.
6. CORRECTING WRITTEN WORK
7. CONCLUSION.
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0. INTRODUCTION
The Royal Decree 126/2014, 24 July, organizes the contents for the English area in five blocks, being
two of them reading comprehension and writing production, two skills that can not be separated. The
contents included go from the association of graphics, meaning and pronunciation of simple words, in
the first levels, to the reading and writing of texts in several supports and based on different topics of
interest for the students, in the following ones.
Every writing system consists of an inventory of graphemes. A grapheme is a symbol or a set of
symbols used to represent sounds; it is a spelling of a particular sound. Each grapheme of a writing
system is used to represent a unit of the language being written. In a syllabary, the graphemes stand
for syllables; in an alphabet, the graphemes stand for phonemes. Spanish has almost a grapheme for
each sounds, although sometimes there are two graphemes for one sound. English has numerous
graphemes for each sound, for example, the /i/ sound: me, see, seat, receive, machine, people.
In this unit we will look at the English writing system and how to teach it. English spelling is a
particularly difficult area to teach because of the difference between the oral and the written forms.
This might lead our student to having problems when writing or reading.
Writing words properly is one of the strategies that our students should acquire in Primary Education.
The current law establishes that student must achieve communicative competence in the language, and
one of the subcompetences is the grammatical one, which refers to the correct use of the linguistic
code.

1. ORTHOGRAFIC COMPETENCE
Language teaching is based on the idea that the goal of language acquisition is communicative
competence: the ability to use the language correctly and appropriately to accomplish communication
goals. The desired outcome of the language learning process is the ability to communicate
competently, not the ability to use the language exactly as a native speaker does.
The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) defines “communicative language
competences” as the competences that empower a person to act using specifically linguistic means.
There are linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences. Among the different linguistic
competence is the orthographic competence.
The orthographic competence is the part of a language that studies how to write words properly and
how to use punctuations marks appropriately. The conventions for spelling correspond to the sounds
used in speech and the conventions for punctuation help represent the pauses and intonation of speech.
The concept of ortographic competence involves a knowledge of and skill in the perception and pro-
duction of the symbols which written texts are composed of. The writing systems of all European lan -
guages are based on the alphabetic principle.
For alphabetic systems, learners should know and be able to perceive and produce:
1. The form of letters in printed and cursive forms.
2. The proper spelling of words, including recognised contracted forms.
3. Punctuation marks and their conventions of use.
4. Typographical conventions and varieties of front
5. Logographic signs in common use.
To conclude, to develop our students´ortographic competence, we must use two senses: sight to read
and hearing to receive speech and vocalization.
 Punctuation marks and their conventions of use
The aim of this section is to study some of the numerous graphic displays that are unique to written
communication and that may have communicative significance.
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To make reading easier we use punctuation marks, these are graphic signs with multiple functions. We
can distinguish two major functions for punctuation marks: either they separate or they enclose:
-Marks for separate: colon, semicolon and comma
-Enclosing marks: dashes, commas, parentheses.
Some of the punctuation marks teachers must teach their students are:
 Abbreviatons: a shortened form of a word or phrase. E.g.: adjetive: Adj.
 Acronyms: an abbreviation formed form the initial letters of other words. E.g.: NASA, BBC
 Comma (,): to separate ideas, adjectives and to avoid misinterpretation.
 Colon (:) to introduce identifications, examples and quotations or direct speech.
 Semicolon (;): to separate two or more independent clauses that are placed next to each other
within a sentence.
 Full stop (.): is the most usual punctuation mark for the end of an ortographic sentence.
 Question mark (?): to signal that the sentence is a question. It is placed at the end of a sentence.
 Exclamation marks (!): to signal that the sentence is a forceful utterance. We use it for: Ex-
clamatory questions, wishes, warning or alarms, vocatives, interjections.
 Apostrophes (´): to signal the genitive case of nouns.
 Dashes (-): to separate two units only, to represent a pause in a dialogue, to indicate hesitation
in a dialogue, to indicate a missing letter or a word that has been suppressed.
 Hyphens: to link words that form a compound word. E.g.: tax-free.
 Parentheses or brackets (): to enclose content that the writer sets out apart so that it does not in-
terrupt the flow of the sentence.
 Square brackets [ ]: to indicate an editorial insertion in a quotation.
 Ellipsis points (…): for omissions in quotations and for hesitation or suspense.
 Quotation Marks ("): to indicate the exact words of a speaker or writer in quotations, including
direct speech.

2. DESCRIPTION OF THE ENGLISH SPELLING.

Diachronic Study
The earliest English alphabet was created by missionaries in Britain, who used the Irish forms of the
Latin alphabet to present the sounds of Anglo- Saxon as phonetically as possible. The fact was that an
alphabet of 27 graphemes had to cope with a sound system of nearly 40 phonemes. Many sounds still
had to be made by combinations of letters.
When French scribes introduced new orthographic conventions, new characters (K, g, q, v, w, z,) were
brought into use. His was a great change.
In the 16th century there was a fashion to make spelling reflect Latin or Greek etymology. In the
following century many new loans entered English from French, Spanish, and Italian...... These
varieties introduce new patterns of spelling such as (ll), (zz), and (tt).
The result is a system that is an amalgam of different traditions.
Synchronous Study
There is basically a single spelling and punctuation system, with two minor subsystems: British and
American.
There are some differences between them, there are grammar differences (USA gotten / GB got),
lexical differences (USA apartment / GB flat), spelling differences (USA practice / GB practise) and
pronunciation differences (USA Stress vowels are longer / GB vowels are nasalized).
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3. SOUND-SPELLING CORRESPONDENCES.
I will mention now some significant relationships between English orthography and sounds.
Vowels
Phoneme Examples
/æ/ Trap, sat, plait
/ɑː/ Pass, car, heart.
/e/ Dress, set, dead.
/ɪ/ Kit, happy, rich, city.
/iː/ Tree, complete, sea, key.
/ɒ/ Lot, cloth, was, because.
/ɔː/ Thought, north, force, talk.
/ʊ/ Foot, sugar, woman.
/uː/ Goose, food, do, rude.
/ʌ/ Sun, son, blood, does.
/ɜː/ Nurse, bird, her, bleu.
/ə/ Letter, vegetable, doctor, furniture.

Glides
/aI/ Price, time.
/aʊ/ Mouth, house.
/ɔɪ/ Choice, toy.
/eɪ/ Face, day.
/eə/ Square, air.
/ʊə/ Cure, poor
/ɪə/ Near, dear, ear.
/əʊ/ Goat, old

Consonants
VOICELESS VOICED

/p/ Apple, play /b/ Ball

/t/ Tea, jumped. /d/ Day, doddle.

/k/ Kind, box, cake. /g/ Ago, ghost.

/ʧ/ Chain, watch, nature. /ʤ/ Midget, suggest, soldier.

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/f/ Fork, off, enough. /v/ Vine.

/θ/ Thief, think, through. /ð/ There, this, that.

/s/ So, pass, niece. /z/ Roses, zoo, dizzy.

/ʃ/ Shoe, machine, ocean. /ʒ/ Vision, measure, beige.

/h/ Hat, who, jam. /m/ Mum, swimming.

/n/ No, tin.

/ŋ/ Sing, sink, uncle.

/l/ Coliflower, yellow.

/r/ Rat, carry, rhythm.

Semi-vowels
/j/ Yes, union, onion, new.
/w/ West, twelve, white.

4. TEACHING THE VISUAL WRITING SKILLS.

Visual awareness is important so that we can handle the exceptions to regular patterns. So visual
strategies are an aspect we must work in the class. We must introduce spelling after oral language, that
is, after learners have acquire the phonological stage. It is important for our student to develop a good
visual memory in order to become good spellers.
Young children's writing learning must cope with several aspects of the writing process:
- Graphical or visual skills. They include writing graphemes, spelling, punctuation and capitalization.
- Grammatical skills. The ability to use correctly different kinds of structures and sentence
constructions.
- Expressive (Stylistic) skills. They ability to express precise meaning in a variety of styles.
- Rhetorical skills. The' ability to use connectors in order to link parts of a text.
- Organizational skills. The ability to refuse irrelevant information and summarizing the most
important ideas.
In the early stages of Learning and teaching English, our pupils will generally write very little. At the
beginning, pupils will do dictations guided by the teacher, beginning with words and later with
sentences.
For teaching how to write English we have to present the activity before doing anything, use visual
support and create a positive attitude towards leaning of written English.

5. PROPOSAL FOR THE DIDACTICS OF THE WRITING CODE.

The process for teaching spelling follows these steps:
1. Word-recognitions activities: In this stage pupils notice the word shape and the number of letters in
the word so they can make a mental picture of it. This is an initial stage, in which the students are
given the words they need.
Some activities are: read and match the picture with the word; joining up dots to form words, putting
letters of a word in order; spelling dictations; games; etc.
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2) Practice activities: The teacher will not have to provide the pupils with words they need. They will
think about the spelling of the words by themselves.
Some activities are: crosswords; labelling items; making lists of vocabulary sets; classifying items;
completing texts; dictations; punctuating texts; correcting mistakes in written sentences.
c) Strategies to check spelling: The teacher must provide the students with strategies to check their
spelling.
Some activities are: using dictionaries; making personal dictionaries; classifying words according to
the similarities in their spellings; class posters.

6. SPELLING IN WRITING ACTIVITIES

Writing in English is not easy, teachers need to motivate students to practise writing, one idea is using
teaching through games.
- Advantages of using a games in the classroom
There are many advantages of using games in the classroom:
1. Games are a welcome break from the usual routine of the language class.
2. They are motivating and challenging.
3. Games help students to make and sustain the effort of learning.
4. Games provide language practice in the various skills
5. They encourage students to interact and communicate.
6. They create a meaningful context for language use.
- Writing Activities
Writing activities must be done in a motivated context and if it is possible with visual support:
- At word level: Making lists, making personal dictionaries, working out anagrams, completing
crosswords, classifying words under headings, word bingo or the hangman.
- At sentence level: Writing captions for pictures, writing speech bubbles for cartoons, joining
broken sentences, correcting mistakes in written sentences or answering questions.
Once the students are familiar with spelling at word and sentence level, the teacher must help them to
write texts as purposeful and contextualized as possible. The students must be provided with a variety
of writing activities that range from controlled practice to freer practice, with different purposes in
mind. The learners can be encouraged to write different text types. Current English language teaching
focuses much of its attention on “real-world” writing.
Keeping in mind the students' ages and interest, we could make the following classification:
- Writing for oneself: lists, addresses, diaries, recipes, notes.
- Writing for maintaining social relationships: seasonal greetings, instructions, letters.
- Writing for entertainment: songs, jokes, games.

7. CORRECTING WRITTEN WORK

Students make errors when they do something that they are not yet capable of doing. These errors
must be seen as positive evidence of the learning process.
The teacher's positive attitude to error is crucial importance for the learner. He/she must help their
students to sort things out for themselves. It is perfectly reasonable to make them correct their own
mistakes.
Teachers must be very careful when correcting mistakes, they must find the balance and just correct
mistakes according to their students' level. Overcorrection is counterproductive.
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8. CONCLUSION.
Writing words properly is one of the aims of our current Educational System: the students should
know how to use the linguistic code correctly in order to develop the communicative competence.
The Decree 89/2014, 24th July, establishes for the Autonomous Community of Madrid the curriculum
for the Primary stage in which develops the contents for the English area sequenced by grades. Ex-
amples of these contents, regarding to the teaching/learning of written expression, and dealing with
the issue we have developed in this unit, move from the acquisition of the use of capital letter and
period in the first grade to the use of the correct punctuation and apostrophises in the 6th grade.
The developing of writing skills starts at the spelling level. But spelling in English is a particularly
difficult area to learn because of the difference between the oral and the written forms. Therefore, the
foreign-language teacher must provide the learner with intensive and systematic practise so they can
learn how to write English words properly.
Writing words properly is one of the aims of our current Educational System: the students, amongst
other subcompetences, should know how to use the linguistic code correctly (grammatical
competence) in order to develop communicative competence, which is the aim of the current
educational law.
In order to face the challenges of writing and produce work they can be proud of, students will need
lots of practice, guidance, and encouragement from their teachers and their peers.
Furthermore, to make writing something students will find to be worth working at, we will need to
help them understand, through their experiences with writing in and out of our classrooms, why we
write. What is the range of purposes for which people, in school and in the wider society, compose
texts and offer them to readers.