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Tip 1
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- Inspire Confidence: Check that the environment is right for the student and that they are comfortable
- Make sure that the student wants to be a good speller.
(Perhaps they get a lot out of not being a good speller. You might like to ask them what they get out of it).
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NLP & Coaching helps students to learn in a way that encourages them to find their own solutions. They then become more confident and start to believe that they can achieve the results they want.
Belief underpins every decision that we make. Henry Ford said, “Whether you believe you can or whether you believe you can’t, you are right.” I believe that “If you believe they can succeed, you will find a way to help them”. ‘Minding Your Spelling with NLP & Coaching’ by Kerrigan M will help you find a way together with the Spelling Sense with NLP & Coaching Literacy Programme.
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Tip 2
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- Desire to succeed/motivation:
- Make sure that the learners are in a positive frame of mind and have the desire to succeed before they start the process. Help them to remember all the things that they have learnt already, like learning to talk, walk, paint, make things, swim, ride a bike, run, skip, jump throw /catch /hit /kick a ball etc. Remind them that when they were learning those things, if they did not get them right first time, they kept practising so they could improve and eventually they did improve and they achieved what they wanted.
- Start with what they can already spell correctly and ask them how they managed to learn those words. If they say that they are easy words, just ask them if they would like to learn to spell more words if they were just as easy to learn.
- Discover which words they would like to learn to spell first.
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Noticing how your students motivate or de-motivate themselves will help you find the appropriate words to use when coaching them. By gaining rapport with students, instinctively you know what they need and you are able to find the appropriate comments and incisive questions that help them to draw upon their own resources so that they feel, as well as think that they want to learn.
Lack of motivation in some students can be caused by students thinking that it is d ifficult to spell well and feeling that they will never learn.
You can learn more about how to work with difficult students, how to build rapport and use language that engages and inspires them, how to ask incisive questions that lead them to the solutions they want by reading ‘Minding Your Spelling with NLP & Coaching’ by Kerrigan M will help you find a way together with the Spelling Sense with NLP & Coaching Literacy Programme. In the mean time you are welcome to join the mailing list for more tips.
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Tip 3
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- Check sight and hearing ability
- Check that students can see the writing on the board and on the page. Always check with an eye specialist if there are any difficulties with vision. ‘Eye tracking’ and listening skills can often improve when you use this technique.
- Check that students can hear efficiently Listening skills can be improved to help some students to focus and hear more clearly. See TIP 5
- Always check with a hearing specialist if there are any difficulties with hearing. Students who currently use coloured overlays may discover that when they have a more relaxed approach to learning to read through learning to spell they gradually decrease their need for coloured overlays
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‘Eye tracking’ is often part of the eye test that is offered by optometrists. The student may be asked to follow the tip of the finger of the optometrist moving across their field of vision.
Sometimes students with a specific learning disability such as dyslexia display a certain jumpiness in their eye tracking. This can often become smoother by using the processes in the strategies in this spelling process.
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Tip 4
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- Check/improve visualisation
- Make sure they can visualise objects like their front door, their TV screen, characters on TV, a parent…. How do they know which person to go to after school to take them home? …… How do they know who their friend is? How do they know which dog / toy belongs to them? This reassures those students who think they cannot visualise.
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More help with visualising can be found in the Spelling Sense with NLP & Coaching Literacy Programmeand ‘Minding Your Spelling with NLP & Coaching’ Kerrigan M 2006
Students often use their hands to describe things, possibly because it helps them to ‘see’ what they are talking about. By using this ability in the spelling process with previously ‘poor spellers’ they will begin to realise that they actually do have some useful resources after all.
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Tip 5
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- Check/improve listening skills
- Discover what they already know and can do. This means asking the student for a word that they think they know how to spell.
- Ask them to spell it as they usually do, either by writing it or spelling it aloud, as they prefer
- Check whether they think it is correct. If they say ‘I don’t know’ go ahead with the remaining tips and ask them to work out how much might be correct. Tell them what is in fact correct.
- If they were correct encourage them to feel that they now have a way of knowing that they are correct. Ask them for another ‘difficult’ word
- If they have written some incorrect graphemes, for example, when some people write the word ‘competition’ they may write ‘competion’, which indicates that they may have a reasonably good visual memory, and they now need to learn the skill of listening more carefully to the chunks
A. CHUNKING:
· Encourage them to notice how many chunks there are in a word by feeling how their jaw moves. Their jaw will move more strongly when moving from chunk to chunk. Suggest that they put their hand under their chin to feel it moving
If the word has more than one syllable or chunk, encourage them to split it up, initially, according to how the word sounds
Do not deliberately show a spelling with incorrect spellings, simply work with the spellings that the student offers and encourage them to correct them by providing them with the extra knowledge that they need about the English spelling code
B. SEGMENTING PHONEMES and relating them to graphemes
- Students then have to fit the graphemes (the letters that represent the sounds) into the word so that it looks like the dictionary example of the word.
- The method of chunking may vary from student to student and from word to word, but whatever they do, they then have to fit the sound units of the word into the accepted spelling.
- If they have seen the word before, ask them to spell it in the best way they can, to discover what they already know.
- The coach’s task is to encourage the student to build on existing knowledge.
- Some students need to discuss what they see in the word to reinforce the retention process. They may be able to see the word ‘ pet’ in competition and it might help them to make a mini poster for a ‘pet competition’ to remember the spelling.
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Listening skills: students need to know exactly what they could be listening for. This process makes it specific.
Students may know they have the correct spelling because the phonemes fit the graphemes, or because the jigsaw of graphemes looks right, or they may need to be tested several times so that they can prove to themselves that they have spelled the word correctly.
Students can learn most of the graphones in the English spelling code by looking at the list of ‘44 English Phonemes’ and taking a mental photograph of them if they feel confident to do so. This will give them a wider knowledge base for the information they need.
Read/listen to Photo Reading by Paul Scheele for more information on ‘photo reading’.
You can obtain more information on chunking in ‘’Minding your Spelling with NLP & Coaching and the Spelling Sense with NLP & Coaching Literacy Programme.
CHUNKING EXAMPLE:
Some students segment the word ‘competition’ to make it sound like
*com per ti shn* or *comp ti shn* or *com pi ti shun*
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