Phonological strategies are often seen mostly in the early years of schooling, and involve students sounding out words in order to recognise the letters that they hear (Westwood, 2005). You've seen it, kids sitting there saying "C-A-T" out loud when reading a word. Well, it applies to spelling as well! How often have you heard or said yourself: "Sound it out" when confronted with a student who does not know how to spell a word? It is a great and important starting point and I still will say it to my students in the middle and upper years when they are stuck on a fairly simple word.
This video by Mr Smith from Teacher Tipster shows how students can use phonological strategies in order to spell a word.
This video by Mr Smith from Teacher Tipster shows how students can use phonological strategies in order to spell a word.
These kinds of strategies are great for those beginning spellers, but what about when a student hits the sound "shun"? What do they do then? This is the danger of limiting students to "sounding it out". By only giving them one strategy to use when they want to write a word they're not quite sure how to spell, we are effectively holding them back. This is where sound investigations can become really effective. You can find out more about the different types of word investigations in the lesson ideas section. Sound investigations involve students being detectives, finding different words with certain sounds. For example, you might have a 'long e' investigation, or a 'k' investigation. Students find words with the sound around the room, in books, posters, and their work. They then come together and share their words. You then can create a table as a class of all the different ways that sound appears (for example, long e can appear as ea, y, ey, ee, ie, ei, i, e, eo, and ly, phew!). Be wary though: having an anchor chart of these different sounds is great but too much information can be overwhelming for kids. For your anchor charts, stick to the most common representations.
To help develop phonological strategies (Westwood, 2005):
- Teach students that one letter can represent a number of sounds. One way to do this is through letter investigations (detailed in the lesson ideas section).
- Teach students that the same sound can be represented by different letters. One way to do this is through sound investigations (detailed above).
- Teach students an awareness of onset and rime. Ways to teach this are detailed in the lesson ideas section under Rounding Up The Rhymes.
While phonetic strategies are really useful, students will eventually get stuck if they only have one strategy to rely on. So...