Hi everyone
At the school at which I am Director of Studies, in China, all teachers use
the phonemic chart when teaching vocabulary and pronunciation. They 'model
and drill' until the students 'get it right'. The Chinese also use it to
help us with our Chinese pronunciation, although with the tones in Chinese
it is also a case of drilling drilling and more drilling...and if we get it
wrong heavens knows what we say, but it often has the Chinese falling over
laughing!

I also use a method for teaching how to remember the spelling of a word
which I used to use when I taught literacy in England. Goes like
this.....(1) model and drill (2) once the students know what the word means,
and have pronounced it correctly, the word is written on the board (3) the
stress is elicited from the students and then the stress is written over the
word (4) I then ask the students what the first and last letter of the word
is (5) then ask the students how many letters are in the word (6) what is
the 'shape' of the word (draw the shape) (7) the students write the word
after which I delete the word from the board (8) they cover the word they
have written (8) they write the word again (9) uncover the original and
check (10) repeat this process until they get it right.

The 'trick' here is to remember the first and last letter, number of letters
and 'shape'. It has been shown that if you know the first and last letter
of a word, and the word has the correct number of letters, even if all other
letters are jumbled, when reading a piece of text you can understand the
text.

Example: The sutendt wnats to laren his vcobaualry qiuklcy and as esilay as
pisoslbe, and any hlep we tacehres can gvie tehm, any tcenhnquie wicth mkaes
this smilper, we suohld at laest try.

This method certainly helped my literacy students. Obviously you only use
it for the more 'difficult' words!

Hope this helps.

regards
Dee Bond

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