The UK government is going to penalize children who cannot spell. It is a view my parents would have totally agreed with! Most people view good spelling as a useful measure of someone’s abilities.
But then most people don’t understand why people cannot spell. They presume it is a lack of effort, intelligence and practice.
If you are a parent with a child struggling to spell, you will know that effort is certainly not the issue. Many children learn their spellings week after week, but still cannot spell those same words in their free writing just days later. It is like pushing water up a hill.
The reason for this situation is that the child is reading by sight-recognising whole words, instead of decoding them. A lot of bright children with good visual memories view this as the easier option, because English doesn’t routinely follow phonic rules. There are literally thousands of seemingly random inconsistencies in our word spellings.
We find that the only way to fix the spelling headache is to go back to ABC with the reading. Our Guided Phonetic Reading, Trainertext Method, gets the child decoding successfully for a few minutes each day, until they have the right foundation to start spelling accurately too.
Complexities of the English language explained with our Trainertext characters
We find their reading comprehension generally improves significantly as well, even if they were at grade level beforehand.
You can give Trainertext a free trial here.
You can find more information on the SAT reform on the Guardian here.
– David Morgan, CEO of Oxford Learning Solutions