Spell Check and Writing Tasks in High School

Spell Checkers and Texting Promote Accurate Spelling

May 17, 2009

Technology is sometimes blamed for declining spelling proficiency of high school students. However, spell check and related tools may help students.

In general, spelling proficiency is a function of learning letter patterns as they occur in English words rather than a rote memorization task. Further, the skill is developmental meaning it is acquired over time (Schlagal, 2007). Children who have wide experience as readers encounter many more words and thus their spellings, as well. Wide-reading and extensive writing opportunities coupled with effective spelling instruction can result in better spellers.

Successful spellers attend to the patterns they know and note differences when they are unsure of a traditional spelling or note an unusual letter order in a reliable source. Students may legitimately be held accountable in secondary schools for spelling most words correctly. Technology can help.

Word Recognition

Spelling and reading are related in many ways. Good readers notice patterns of unfamiliar words and become increasingly proficient in recognizing words without attending to every letter in the word. Spell check can help students attend to these patterns because it highlights errors. In some cases, spell checkers can correct typographical errors. For example in typing the word “recognition” the author inverted the letters "g" and "n" but the spell checker in the author’s word-processor automatically made the correction. Students might be encouraged to note how often the spell checker corrects typographical errors.

Most often, spell check functions highlight a potentially misspelled word rather than correct it, however. When this happens, the word-processing tools can help students identify possible correct words and spellings. One popular word-processor permits the writer to right-click to bring up a list of suggested words. By attending to the suggestions of the spell checker, students can learn to be increasingly conscious of the letter order and word choices they make.

iTap and Texting

Students use the short message system or texting features of their cell phones quite often. Texting on a traditional numeric number pad is made easier through technologies such as iTap which suggests or predicts words as the word is typed numerically. For example, the word “Hello” is represented by the numbers 4-3-5-5-6 but by the time the numbers 4-3-5 are typed, iTap predicts that the word “hello” is what the writer intends and suggests it. Young writers who know how to effectively use iTap and related technologies may be learning letter order as part of the English orthographical system.

Teach the Limitations of Spell Check

Spell checkers are increasingly sophisticated tools, but they do have limitations. Students might be challenged to find words as they type that the spell-checker might miss. Words of the same grammatical type are easily missed by spell-check functions. Caret, carat, and carrot are all nouns, and thus their substitution in a sentence is often ignored by the spell-checker. Teachers can help students realize that the spell checker is just one of many tools that can help them be effective and accurate writers.

Students can use other resources in support of spelling words correctly, as well. Online and traditional dictionaries can help students verify the correct spelling of a word or note regional or alternate spellings. Effective spelling instruction might also include teaching students to ask peers for assistance.

Spelling Error Games

Make a game of it: What did the computer miss? Teachers might provide documents to students with common misspellings or errors using content-area words (from science or math, for example) or other common errors (peak for pique, for example) and have students race against each other to find the errors using spell check and online dictionaries to find the correct spelling. Key spelling words related to content (“federalism” in social studies, “algorithm” in math, and so on) can be presented to students as if typed out on a numeric keypad. Students might compete to determine who first can identify the numeric pattern “2-5-4-6-7-4-8-6” as “algorithm” with bonus points for any numeric pattern that might also be another word besides the target word, “algorithm,” as well.

Time to Edit

Finally, teachers can assist students with spelling by providing time for editing work in class. In class, students have access to resources to edit their work for spelling and other conventions that may not be available elsewhere. As important, students learn that teachers who provide time for editing insist on correct spelling, and help students to use spelling resources correctly value spelling. Spelling, after all, should count.

Schlagal, B. (2007). Best practices in spelling and handwriting. In S. Graham, C. A. MacArthur, and J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Best practices in writing instruction, pp. 179-200. New York: The Guilford Press.

The copyright of the article Spell Check and Writing Tasks in High School in Technological Teaching Aids is owned by Tom Wolsey. Permission to republish Spell Check and Writing Tasks in High School in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.