Providing a practical look at the role of spelling in the overall language arts curriculum, this book helps those who interact regularly with young children understand how learning to spell is part of the broader fabric of learning to write in whole language classrooms. After an introduction, chapter 1 provides opportunities to explore how teachers' beliefs about language and literacy learning impact how they view their students' writing. Chapter 2 introduces three teachers who tell their personal stories of transition from a traditional approach to spelling instruction to incorporating the study of spelling in use in their whole language classrooms. Chapter 3 provides suggestions for developing ways to systematically study and assess children's spelling in use. Chapter 4 presents the "nuts and bolts" of spelling instruction in a whole language classroom. Chapter 5 provides practical help in communicating with parents about the teaching of spelling in use. The final chapter responds to questions that teachers most often ask about spelling instruction. Contains 19 references. (RS)

This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. It's a reference work intended for anyone interested in the English language, especially those who teach it, whatever the age or mother tongue of their students. It will be particularly useful to those wishing to produce well-designed materials for teaching initial literacy via phonics, for teaching English as a foreign or second language, and for teacher training. English spelling is notoriously complicated and difficult to learn; it is correctly described as much less regular and predictable than any other alphabetic orthography. However, there is more regularity in the English spelling system than is generally appreciated. This book provides, for the first time, a thorough account of the whole complex system. It does so by describing how phonemes relate to graphemes and vice versa. It enables searches for particular words, so that one can easily find, not the meanings or pronunciations of words, but the other words with which those with unusual phoneme-grapheme/grapheme-phoneme correspondences keep company. Other unique features of this book include teacher-friendly lists of correspondences and various regularities not described by previous authorities, for example the strong tendency for the letter-name vowel phonemes (the names of the letters ) to be spelt with those single letters in non-final syllables.

Provides more than 1,100 hand-printed, high-frequency words appropriate for intermediate students. Extra pages with blank lines are included to support a growing vocabulary.

Complete rules for correct spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation of 25,000 words.