Now you have some idea of the various techniques that help struggling learners. How do you know which technique to use and when? Moreover, how do you know if a technique is working?

There are two camps when it comes to dyslexia tuition and intervention.

1. All interventions should be standardised and tested.
2. All interventions should be tailored and specific to each child.

There are pros and cons to each camp. When interventions are standardised and tested, it creates a blanket approach to spelling instruction. The national curriculum is an example of a standardised way of working. However, it strips some of the assessment and monitoring skills away from the educator due to the blanket approach.

Standardisation is also a form of ‘one size fits all approach‘. Some learners will always be left behind with standardised instruction. A one size fits all approach will not work for every child. This is just the case with learners who have dyslexia. Due to the standardisation of the national curriculum within government-funded schools in the UK, the national curriculum does not account for dyslexia, and some learners will never progress with their spelling with phonics alone. When you’re working one-to-one with a learner, you should avoid a standardised approach. Instead, use a tailored, specific plan for each learner.

When tuition is tailored to individual learners, the skill of choosing the interventions and the initial assessment of the learner remains with the educator. This means there needs to be a huge amount of trust that the educator – in our case, tutor – will think about which types of interventions suit the learner and continuously remain open and curious about how the child is learning.

Within Westcountry SEN, we are firmly in the second camp. We trust our educators to tailor all lessons to each learner. Therefore, tutors need to know what to look for, that is, what markers would make one intervention more appropriate than another. Also, how to adapt, change or add bits of other interventions to make each lesson count.

This approach is what we call a dynamic approach. We know that we may start on one path and then change direction to tailor the tutoring to specific academic tasks. In all cases, we need to match what is being taught to each learners individual learning needs. We are all so different as people; why should learning be standardised as a one-size-fits-all?

Do you remember our analogy of a plumber in our last lesson? If a plumber just had one way of approaching every task, where is the creativity, and where is the problem solving when it comes to more difficult problems?

Tutors and teachers who cannot adapt and find out how each child needs to learn, unfortunately, will end up saying the learning limit is within the child. If the learner is being described as unable to spell, I would strongly argue that the tutor or teacher is struggling to find a way to teach that particular learner.

The responsibility is with the tutor and, once the tutor fully understands this, then the doors of opportunity really will fly open as the tutor focuses on the learner and asks themselves important questions. Such as,

• How does this particular learner learn?
• What type of mistakes does this learner make?
• Are the spelling errors consistent, or do they change?
• Is this learner relying on a sound it out method?
• Do they understand the meanings behind the words?
• Do they think visually?
• Would visual anchors help?
• What can I do to meet this learner’s educational needs?
• what do I need to do differently so this learner can learn better?

Tutors who don’t ask themselves these types of questions run the risk of picking one type of intervention, probably one they like or understand the most, and repeating that same intervention over and over again, believing that practise makes perfect.

In this lesson, we will help you to know how to start and know how to assess if the technique is working.

What Personality or thinking style does the learner have?

If you get this right, you will get the tutoring right for every child you meet. This is the key to all tuition. What type of personality does this learner have? What type of cognition does this learner prefer? How do they think? How do they remember best? How does this learner need me to present the information in a way it will make sense to them? Let go of your training and become curious, focus on each learner not what has worked previously for other learners you have tutored.

Do you know, that sometimes the best tutors are those who are in training or have never taught before? It is because they are learning. They are working hard to see what works and what doesn’t work. 

If a learner is the type of person who likes to know the ‘why’ and ‘how’ things work. Then they can only understand something once they can fully grasp the concepts. These types of learners will not respond well to fact-based tuition e.g. using spelling rules or an overreliance on flashcards. Remember, many psychologists have found for some dyslexic learners that the ability to store information in the long-term memory and be able to recall it easier is only possible when the information is understood. In this case, semantic memory is stronger than procedural or fact-based memory.  For these types of learners, weaving in the ontology of language as a memory aid will help them understand how the language works, and they will be able to build spelling skills on top of that knowledge. For semantic-based learners, without the foundation of how language works and how the origins of words can create word families based on meaning, all the spelling patterns will have nothing to anchor to in the long-term memory.

Does the learner need to ‘do’ to learn? By ‘do’ we mean to create an activity so the learner has an experience of what they are learning. For some learners with dyslexia learning by doing, such as making shapes with their body to represent the letters will help the long-term recall of these words.

However, this learning by ‘doing’ is a type of kinaesthetic learning, it is often a go-to intervention for dyslexia. However, it is often overused. Learning by doing doesn’t work for all children.  In some cases, the ‘doing’ dilutes the learning by crowding out the concepts they are trying to understand. A child who needs to learn the ‘why’ could become frustrated by a tutor who wants to make everything a fun activity.

Is this child visual?

If you have a visual child then relying on the 2D nature of spelling patterns is going to make spelling and writing unnatural from the way they think. Talk to your learner and find out when they read if they see or hear the sounds. When they write a story what happens? Do they hear the words in their head, or do they see their ideas like a film?

For learners who are visual and mainly see in pictures, working visually and connecting the non-picture words (manly high-frequency words) is going to be more helpful.

If you yourself are a non-picture writer, meaning you hear and see letters instead, then it might be hard to imagine how some learners think in pictures, but they really do! Be mindful that no one may have asked the learner these types of questions before, so the question may be initially hard to answer. Give the learner time to come back to you to explain what happens for them when they read and write. It might be completely new to them that there is another way.

I really recommend you read Dyslexia – Visually Dear Auditory Blind by Gary Chevin (2009). 

When you read this book, note your responses to the grammar errors and spelling mistakes. Chevis’s Dyslexia is quite severe and while he did edit the text, there are a lot of errors. I’ve seen countless reviews that have dismissed the book because of these errors.

Think back to the lesson on why spelling matters, and how we discussed society’s reaction to public spelling mistakes. What was your reaction to reading this book?

Use a writing sample

A child’s writing sample is always going to tell you what you need to know more than any standardised spelling test. Are they spelling using only sound it out’ strategies? Is the child mixing homophones or spelling rules? Were they able to spell one word correctly at the start of their writing, then lost confidence and misspelled it towards the middle of the writing? Is the spelling automated? Does the learner spell a word in many different ways in the same piece of writing? Does the child know any spelling systems other than the start and end letter of a word?

Let’s remind ourselves of Miles list

Miles (1993) through his years of dyslexia research in regard to spelling describes 13 ‘dyslexic milestones’ These milestones are common dyslexia spelling errors.

1. The impossible trigram.  This is a sequence of letters that are impossible in the English language ‘lqu’ for liquid ‘cwiyatly’ for quietly.
2. The misrepresentation of the sound; of consonants and of vowel sounds.  Such as ‘cet’ for ‘get’ and ‘pad’ for pat which shows a misrepresentation of the consonants.  Also ‘cot’ for cut and ‘mat’ for met which shows a misrepresentation of the short vowels. Miles stated this is not an auditory difficulty, but the errors are resulting from an ‘auditory confusability’. Children who make these errors are often referred to hearing clinics and they will find nothing wrong.
3. Wrong boundaries. Words may be run together (e.g halfanhour for half an hour) or incorrectly separated (e.g a-nother instead of another)
4. Wrong syllabification: Either too many syllables (e.g sundedly for suddenly or rember for remember)
5. Inconsistent spelling: The word is spelt in different ways on the same page (e.g schole, skool, scole)
6. Wrong letter doubled (e.g eeg for egg)
7. All the letters of the word are used, but in the wrong order (eg form for from,  gte for get) this is often caused by poor visual sequencing skills and memory.
8. A false match for order:  The letters in the word are correct, but parts are in the wrong order. This incorrect order is similar to the above but more than just one or two letters. (e.g Sitser for sister, poelpe for people)
9. The omission of sounding letters (e.g amt for amount)
10. Duplication for one or more sounding letters (eg piyole for pile)
11. Incorrect phonetic attempt to spell a word: (e.g yuwer for your, yoos for use)
12. Intrusive vowels: (eg tewenty for twenty, miy-yils for miles)
13. B-D substitution (e.g bady for baby, decos for because)

Source: Miles T. R (1993) Dyslexia: The Pattern of Difficulties (2nd edition) Whurr Publishers Ltd London:75-85

Seeing where the mistakes are will help you know where to start. For example, if the learner is consistently using impossible trigrams, they are not hearing any sounds or have liked the syllables to words. Using the wrong syllables means the learner doesn’t have any form of mental connection with the words they are trying to spell, morphemes and working with orthology can provide the learner with another strategy to connect with words and their spellings.

Space out Repetition in Bursts

There’s a fine line between facilitating repetition and repetition that will not produce good results. Repeating the same method over and over again week after week and not seeing any progress, is unlikely to produce good results. However, repeating methods that are getting some success a few times, will show you how much potential that method can unlock for each learner.

I would suggest the rule of three. Try it three times and if it’s not gaining traction, meaning there is no improvement in spelling, see how you can alter the intervention, whether you need to bring other types of interventions into the mix. For example, there is no harm in working visually using picture cue cards for the high-frequency words and making the words more memorable by focusing on the orthology and word family groups using morphemes.

As long as you are working very hard with each child to try and understand how that child learns you will get the right intervention and support that child to become more competent in their spelling.

Aid recall

In order to help children with the recall process of spelling, remember it’s not just learning how to spell words, it’s learning how to retrieve that spelling from the long-term memory with speed whilst writing. The aim is to try to make the spelling of the words you are working on automatic. This is what many learners with dyslexia struggle with, the automatisation of sequencing tasks. Or when they can learn them (e.g learn for tests, or when first learning them) a few days later they can be forgotten as if you had never seen them before.  Don’t be disheartened, automatisation is possible if you practice the recall and create stronger pathways to the spelling memory bank.

For example, you could have pictures to represent the words to be learned and create a game that tests the recall of those spellings in various activities.  Catching a ball and only throwing it after the word is spelt correctly. Changing the order of the picture card and see if the learner can make a new sentence with the words in the new order. Looking at the origin of those words and asking the child to describe the history of the word as they try and remember how the word is spelt.

What will be the take-home message from each lesson?

Although writing about teaching maths, in his wonderful book How I wish I’d taught maths, Craig Barton (2018) describes how the desire and motivation to make a lesson interesting and memorable can dilute the actual academic concept. Barton describes how he devised what he thought was a really engaging lesson on fractions using jam roly-poly cakes. He met his student a bit later and asked the student what they remember the lesson to be about, they all said jam roly-polies. Barton realised that students were remembering the ‘fun’ engaging bit and not the academic concept.

I recently asked a child who was learning to count without a number line with dinosaur counters what the lesson was about. the child told me the lesson was about dinosaurs

It is effortless to spend too much time and focus on the multisensory aspect, or the child interest to make a lesson engaging and dilute the learning concept. You want the child to remember the words they were spelling or associated concepts and patterns, not just the bit that related to them. On the flip side, if you make a lesson too boring, the child will not engage. It is a fine balance at all times.

Use Free Writing to Assess

We have spoken about what freewriting is before. So, whilst we don’t need to redefine it, we do need to recap that it is the best tool for spotting how each learner understands the language they are trying to express themselves with. It shows how they spell when they are trying to create and when they are trying to tell stories or describe. It is the truest form of assessment that any test or standardised assessment tool can give you.

However, it isn’t easy to get the child to write at times. Some children will love writing small pieces, and other children will be reluctant writers. Story pairs are the best way to get all learners writing.

You start by writing one sentence, for example, I was walking down the road when I saw a huge,….

Then let the child write and carry on. They might write one word (e.g dog). And pass it back to you. The secret is to really love whatever the child contributes.

Tutor: The dog was the biggest dog I’d ever seen, but he looked strange as he was ….

Learner: bright blue..

Tutor: Yes and not only was he bright blue he smelled of toffee apples…

Engage in the children writing and help them express themselves as much as possible. Don’t correct their words just let them write.

Wherever possible read the child’s work back to them with excitement and appreciation, it will motivate the child to write more and more and you will find they will want to write larger chunks with you so they gain the praise and validation.

Top tip. If a child writes a word and you can’t read it, don’t be afraid to say something like, I can’t remember how that word sounds and let the child tell you. The aim of this game is to build the child’s sense of writing and creation as much as possible.

The rules all tutors should follow are:

• never correct spelling or punctuation when writing
• always be positive about what is being created
• don’t look for the mistake in front of the child
• wait until after the session to see what spelling errors are being made
• make a note of the spelling errors to work on in the reports

Crowd the short-term memory to see if any spelling is automated

Assessing single words will always tell you how the learner can spell without any demands on the short-term memory. They need to retrieve the spelling from the long-term memory.  However, writing will never be that.

There is a huge demand on the working memory and processing when writing: ideas of what to write, how to organise the words, how and where to insert grammar. The short-term memory is instantly having to allocate some space to hold the learner’s ideas and writing topic, so there isn’t as much space to allocate to spelling. Remember the working memory is like a mental workstation where things can be worked out. So, with less space available to work things out, a lot of spelling patterns will come out without as much thought. Therefore, you can see what spelling is automated.

So don’t be afraid to test the spelling whilst causing a working memory pull, this way you can see how a child writes and spells in their normal writing mode. A game that you can play is where you say three words to a child (no other cues) and don’t let them write them down such as fish, left and about. The child can write a sentence with them. Always have words that easy for them and one word you have been working on. Let the child make the sentence as funny or as silly as they like, but it must be grammatically correct.

‘The fish left the hospital as they were about to fry eggs in there’

you can then know which words are strongly retained and which words to go back and use your spelling interventions for.

Tutor for competence and confidence

It is always important to build up a child’s confidence with spelling and to help them have the confidence to recognise their own spelling mistakes. Some children will need support to begin their handwriting as they have been used to hiding their spelling mistakes through their handwriting. However, while children and young learners are easily mouldable with their confidence levels, we must also remember at all times to increase their spelling competence at the same time.

We never want to create a situation where the child can become confident they can achieve with spelling and they can try and start expressing themselves confidently, whilst their spelling competence remains low.  The immediate effect of confidence before competence will cause a complete collapse of confidence and unnecessary hurt in the classroom. The long-term effect is a lack of trust in the tutoring relationship.

As you evolve as a spelling tutor, make sure you do everything you can to raise a child’s spelling competence at the same time as their confidence, neither one will support a child in a classroom without the other.

Congratulations 

Well done on completing this spelling course. You can either end the course here. Or, there is a final activity you can complete to earn your course competency certificate.

Follow the quiz link for your end of course practical.