Reading Reform Foundation

Has anyone come across any literature on this?
I have in mind a couple of students I have at present, both of whom make very frequent transcribing errors, eg one Y 8 student copying a sentence with 'crystal' rewrote it as 'cristle'. Such students also often fail to spot their copying errors when checking work. It is not always clear what strategy they are using when transcribing. Sometimes it appears to be letter by letter, not even not looking at what they are actually writing, keeping an eye instead on the text to be copied, although in the example I have given, the student appears to be mapping sound to the correspondences, albeit the wrong ones.
Anyway, other than continuing with reading/spelling/writing instruction as per normal, is there anything else to be done to deal with this?
Pam

The only suggestion I can make at first thought is probably the obvious one that you will have probably done already.

This would be to keep drawing attention to these errors and emphasising in the most kindly, but persistent, way possible to be 'attentive to the detail of spelling' when reading and writing.

Being aware of the tendency to make these little errors is the first necessary step to being able to self-correct or to try to avoid the little errors in the first place.

I would also provide some rationale to the context of English spelling (which I suspect that you will have already done) by providing the history of English leading to the English alphabetic code being the most complex alphabetic code in the world.

This should take away some of the 'within-learner' pressure because it demonstrates why it is so hard to spell correctly and why anyone has to be really, really attentive to the details of English spelling.

I know that you are highly likely to be using one or more Alphabetic Code Charts for your provision, but in case anyone reads this and doesn't know about the usefulness of these charts to 'explain' why spelling is so tricky, then here is the link to the wide range of free Alphabetic Code Charts that people can call upon if helpful:

http://alphabeticcodecharts.com/free_charts.html

But further, you might not know about a chart I drew up with 'pronunciation alternatives'. This chart was never intended for learner-use, but only for teacher-use to demonstrate what complications there are when reading in the English language - a chart from print to sound demonstrates this even more than a chart that rationalises sound to print (44 or so sounds with their various spelling alternatives).

Here is the pronunciation information - but this might further explain that flaws in spelling are totally understandable - and there is no other way round it than that attentiveness to detail.

Here is the pronunciation chart:

http://www.phonicsinternational.com/Pro ... nglish.pdf

Thank you very much Debbie. It is a tricky one, and I suspect, no quick way!