chapter 3
How to teach anyone to spell
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‘Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling ‘banana’,
but didn’t know how you stopped.’
(1)
Terry Pratchett
In this chapter
- Learn the secrets of how to spell well
- Discover the steps to teaching spelling from scratch
- Identify the steps to improve poor spelling
- Make spelling great for the whole class
We taught Louise to spell in 15 minutes during a tea break on a Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning® (NHR) course. Afterwards she was furious! She said, ‘I have been feeling stupid for 30 years – why didn’t anyone teach me how to do this before!’ We explained that perhaps no one else she had met knew the precise steps to teach her to do this. The next day she arrived with coloured pens and large pieces of paper, set about finding every person in the group who had trouble spelling and proceeded to teach them her new-found strategy. She became an evangelist for spelling well, determined that no one else would feel like she had for all those years.
If you have been a poor speller in the past, apply the process we are about to teach you to yourself first, because a basic premise of NLP is ‘you go first’! This spelling strategy is short, sweet and easy to learn, so it is also a good place to start developing your skills for all learning strategies.
Many people refer to the ‘NLP spelling strategy’. This is a little odd since there isn’t actually one spelling strategy and it doesn’t belong to NLP. There is, however, one way that most really good spellers spell and NLP gives us the tools to discover the steps to the strategy (elicit the strategy) and teach others how to do it (install the strategy). Since it is so effective, it makes sense to teach people this way - so let’s sit for a spell!
What makes a good speller is that they are consistent and remember very well what a word looks like. Ask a good speller how to spell a word, and invariably they look up to their left and see the word in their personal spelling database as a big, clear and still picture; when they see this they get a good feeling down the midline of their body – a positive yes!
Ask a person who is ‘OK’ at spelling to spell a word and the process is more cumbersome. They may look up to their left, but they have to check it by sounding the letters out or sometimes breaking the word into phonemes (small units of sound) and then get some sense of it being right – maybe!
Ask a poor speller to spell a word and they will do a whole range of other things. For example, they may look up to their left and discover the word isn’t there, then they may say to themselves, ‘oh no, I don’t know how to spell this’ . Then they will look down and feel bad, and then try to work it out phonetically (foniks dosent werk for spelling in Inglish!) and finally they will get a feeling that lets them know they are still not sure.
A good speller who encounters a new word pays attention to the new word, makes a big still image of the word in their mind, and once they have the picture in their mind, feels certain they have the image which makes them feel good. So what we see is that a person who has a strategy for recalling information will also have a strategy for learning something new in the first place. Notice how quick the process is. Most effective strategies are as short as possible and have no unnecessary pieces or loops.
It is not that some people are naturally good at spelling and some are naturally bad spellers; they have simply worked out a way of spelling that may or may not work well. Invariably, those who have worked out a way of spelling that does not work well have done so because they haven’t been taught a good strategy in the first place. It is our responsibility as teachers to put this right, hopefully before our learners create limiting beliefs such as ‘I can’t spell’ . When teachers teach spelling in the way they believe it works (this may just be the way they do it for themselves) or without sufficient detail in how to spell, the children have no option but to randomly work out a strategy for spelling. So it’s inevitable that some of them get it right and others don’t.
The qualities of the representations are important to an effective strategy. If you are making small, faint images it’s unlikely you will remember these images clearly. To be confident in doing something you want to make a big, clear image of yourself doing it. One lady said during a class, ‘I just can’t see myself doing that somehow’ . It would be easy to assume that this person was speaking metaphorically and there could have been a long conversation about why this was, her past experience of learning, her confidence etc. Instead, she was asked to ‘just move the picture closer so it becomes bigger’ . She said, ‘oh, that’s better, now I can see myself doing this’ .
Now think about how spelling is often taught in schools. The child copies the words down from the whiteboard into one of those narrow, half-size exercise books used especially for spellings. When children are small and learning their first words, they have not graduated to using a pen so the words are written in pencil so the writing is faint and grey. Is it any wonder that they have difficulty remembering small faint letters in a little book?
Teaching Spelling from Scratch
Spelling strategies are the easiest strategies to install in people who can’t spell and it’s a great convincer for a student when they discover they can overcome a previously strongly held limiting belief. You can easily test this out for yourself with a student who wants to spell well. The first distinction to make is whether you are teaching someone to spell a word for the first time
or whether you are improving or correcting
poor spelling. This is an important distinction because the strategy used is slightly different, depending on the situation.
Teaching how to spell a word for the first time
To teach the spelling strategy from scratch, select a word that the learner has no idea how to spell. It’s not necessary to choose a simple word first; it’s more important that it’s a word they want to spell and they are motivated to learn to do it. With children, the word could be to do with a hobby or craze. With adults we often ask, ‘what word always trips you up?’
or ‘what word do you avoid using because you are not sure of it?’
One lady wanted to spell ‘administered’
because she was a nurse and always had to write ‘given’ in patients’ medical notes because she couldn’t yet spell ‘administered’. The length of the word is unimportant because the learner is about to make a complete image of it.
Now take some coloured pens - the NLP Education Team use scented pens (see later) - and ask the student to choose a colour for each letter. Write each letter in nice big lower case letters on a large piece of paper, eg., flipchart paper. Words are generally written in lower case, so this is the lettering to use for teaching how to spell. Have the paper straight ahead of the learner, not flat on the table, and when you are talking to the learner use the correct name of the letter, not the sound. This way you prevent the learner returning to an unhelpful part of their strategy - namely, trying to spell a word phonetically.
Say to them, ‘now close your eyes and make a big picture of the word. When you have a clear picture open your eyes and check that the two words match’ . Repeat this process 2 or 3 times if it helps the student. This is almost always sufficient. The brain makes the image easily and quickly when directed with precision. When the internal and external images match, celebrate their success so the person feels really good – not just nice, but fantastic! (Remember, we are creating a great state to glue to the learning!).
Now ask them to close their eyes again, look at the picture and tell you in sequence what is the first letter, second letter etc. until you get to the end of the word. If the person can’t recall the letter, ask them what colour it is, and then ask them what shape is the colour. This gives them access to the letter through a different channel or representational system. If you use scented pens, you can also ask what the colour smells like to help them further. Increase the celebration and excitement with each letter so the person has a good feeling every time the words match. Continue until they have named all the letters in sequence. (NB - the use of colour and scent does not make this multi-sensory learning, it just provides another route to the image, which is what you want the learner to access).
It’s not just a matter of making sure the person can say each letter. They must also be absolutely convinced that they can now spell this word. So here is the convincer:
Ask the learner to start at the end of the word and spell the word from the last letter to the first. It’s just as easy to do it in reverse as it is forward because they have made a big, clear and still image. Usually, the person will feel good now all by themselves as they realise that they now have a way of learning any word they choose, backwards or forwards. Make sure you celebrate their success to reinforce the good feeling they get when they do it correctly, so that they want that feeling again and again. This builds motivation.
Improving poor spelling
Here is the modification for poor or erratic spellers. Ask the learner to spell a word and observe their strategy as they do this. Ask some helpful questions such as ‘which bit of the word are you unsure about?’
It’s often the middle of the word that is confusing or vague, or it can be an unusual or irregular part of the word. When you ask the learner to look at the word in their mind, the person will often report that they can see some of the word but part of it is blurry, or they can’t see it or it dances about. Select this part of the word and write the whole word out in the same way as before, but this time use black for the part of the word they know and highlight the part of the word they had trouble with in their favourite colour (there is no need to write each letter in a different colour). Then go through the same process as previously outlined to make the image big, clear and still. Remember to celebrate their success and explain that because they can now spell this one word they found tricky, they have the strategy to do the same with any other word they like – forever!
There are lots of tricks to help someone spell, however the most important thing is to pay attention to what they are actually doing and saying, so that you can find the one key piece to change that will make the whole strategy work. So, for example, if someone says they can’t make a picture, back up to show them how to do this first. If the picture dances about, help them to hold it still. Ask them ‘what colour is your front door?’ or ‘what does your favourite shirt look like?’ . Ask them to imagine sitting in a cinema and make a picture of a red rose that fills the movie screen. Do whatever is necessary to help the learner. Paying attention and being creative are essential attributes to using NLP for learning. NLP is a model based on elegance; that is, scientific exactness and precision. In NLP this means that we make the smallest intervention in a very precise way to create the biggest change.
Teaching spelling to the whole class
The strategy outlined here can easily be adapted to whole class teaching and can have a profound effect on your students’ spelling scores. The Durham Project(2) involved a group of teachers with no prior experience of NLP. The teachers were taught as much useful classroom-focused NLP as possible in a day and a half. The results in one particular school were astonishing.
The teacher, Andrea, and her Learning Support Assistant, Kelly, decided to see if they could improve the spelling of the whole group. They realised that they were already doing a number of useful things, so they just made some small changes to the way they taught spelling to improve the internal strategies the children were using. Small changes are not insignificant changes – they can be the ones that are the difference that makes the big difference. The children already looked at the words and wrote them out, then checked they were correct. But there wasn’t a specific instruction as to how to check the words so Andrea and Kelly introduced colour to make the spelling pattern they were concentrating on stand out. This use of colour helps the children make better pictures of the word.
Andrea then changed her language. For example, she asked the children to see the word rather than remember it. The words were written on the right hand side of the board and the children were moved so they sat looking directly at the board and moved their eyes to their left to see the words. Armed with scented felt tip pens, the children wrote out the words on BIG sheets of lining paper. This, in addition to introducing colours, made the task more fun.
A number of the children were not improving as fast as the others, so Kelly made some lovely textured letters to help them recreate the words. Using the textured letters doesn’t mean the children were learning spelling kinaesthetically , just as using scented pens doesn’t mean learning through the olfactory sense. These simply provide another route to learning the words visually . The aim of a strategy is to be as simple as possible, with no additional parts or loops to the sequence. Kelly created the textures to introduce an extra encoding only for those students who needed it. The primary focus was to ensure that the children made really good pictures of the words and the addition of colour and texture aided this process for a few children, but it wasn’t necessary for the majority.
Now look at the spelling scores. Week 1 was the baseline assessment before the changes were introduced:
RESULTS OF THE PROJECT
week 1 – 18% full score |
46% 5 or over correct |
week 2 – 66% full score |
81% 5 or over correct |
week 3 – 71% full score |
92% 5 or over correct |
The step change in the results is nothing less than spectacular. Less than 20% of the children got a full score in the baseline week, whereas more than 70% got all the spellings right just 2 weeks later. This is why NLP learning strategies are a little piece of magic! The full report of this project is included in Part 5 of this book.
A great strategy for learning spelling goes like this:
|
Hear the word spoken |
Ai (Auditory internal) |
|
See the word externally |
Ke (Kinaesthetic external) |
|
Make a big still image on the inside |
Vi (Visual internal) |
|
Feel a positive ‘Yes’ feeling |
Ki (Kinaesthetic internal) |
Once the strategy is installed correctly and the person is a great speller, she/he will hear the word and automatically see a big, clear and still image on the inside, with a positive feeling attached to it.
This is about as short a strategy as a person can have and illustrates the elegance of effective learning strategies.
Of course a child doesn’t need to know about notation, but it is important to keep the learning fun. Here is just one variation especially loved by little boys. It’s best to use a very conspiratorial voice for this!
How to be a great Spy
!
‘This is a secret and only you have the code. Spies have lots of special equipment and secret hiding places. Do you know you have a secret camera that is so small no one else can see it? So here is how to use your special camera to spell every word you see and remember it easily - just like a spy! Look at the word; now take a picture of the word with your secret camera, blink, and click the shutter. Blow up the picture so it is really big and check that your picture is the same as the one on the paper. It is? Good, now look up in your mind and store the picture in your secret filing cabinet. When you hear the word in the test, sneak up inside your mind, open your secret filing cabinet and look at the word. Then copy it down on your sheet. Don’t let anyone know though because it’s top secret and you are training to be a great spy!’
When you listen carefully to the language learners use, they will often tell you directly how they are processing information, especially when you take what they say literally.
For example, imagine a student comes to you saying, ‘I am struggling with this assignment. I just can’t get going with it and I’m stuck. I don’t know what I am doing’ . How would you reply? Remembering the representational systems we mentioned earlier in this chapter, what clues do you have about the sensory channel this student is using to express her problem? Words like ‘struggle’, ‘get going’, ‘doing’ indicate strong kinaesthetic representations. In order to gain rapport with the learner and speak the same language you need to use the same sensory-based language in response, such as, ‘okay Anne, it feels like we need to get to grips with this so let’s roll our sleeves up, get stuck in and unpack the problem’ .
However, if in response, a teacher uses a strong visual preference to solving this particular problem and replies, ‘ okay Anne, clearly you just can’t see the wood for the trees. Let’s take a good look it and see if we can shine some light on the problem, we just need to focus in on the big picture’ . Anne is expressing her (problem) experience using language that is primarily kinaesthetic, revealing that, at this time, she is using the kinaesthetic modalities to access her representation of the problem. By matching her language the teacher has a good chance of helping her, whereas by using his default (visual) language, he runs a great risk of alienating her and she may well retort, ‘oh you just don’t get it’ , and she would be right! If you listen to the way she is representing the problem, you can respond using language which will make her feel like you can really help her. It’s a case of speaking the same language – literally!
Similarly, improving your ability to notice a learner’s eye accessing cues and other nonverbal cues (your sensory acuity), so that you notice ‘how’ people learn, gives you a huge amount of information without anyone saying a word. This can be especially rewarding when dealing with older children and teenagers, who are not known for their love of communicating with adults. Where a person looks, how and when they breathe, and their body posture are all clues to tracking the learning strategy they are using. It helps you to work out which parts work and which don’t.
Take Adam for example, he hasn’t done his homework and when asked why he hasn’t done it, he reveals his strategy for not doing his homework. “Well, I was going to do it and then I imagined playing football instead and I said to myself, ‘what would I rather do? The football is much more exciting than sitting studying’. So I checked the time and decided I could do it later. But when it came to it I was too tired.” Adam’s strategy for not doing his homework begins with him making a picture of himself doing something else. He gives himself a choice by asking a question in his mind and then compares the two different feelings – doing his homework and playing football – makes another picture of time and expands time so that he will have enough time to do both. Finally, he has another feeling (being too tired) and doesn’t do it. Does this sound familiar?
It’s also worth bearing in mind that many people have favourite or habitual ways of expressing themselves and assume that because they are communicating effectively everyone will understand precisely what they mean. This may not be the case! People respond to language at an unconscious level, literally. You may believe you are illustrating a point metaphorically, but the other person may be responding to it in a very different way. Remember the lady who couldn’t see herself doing something?
Understanding how someone learns requires you to track the sequence that they go through using the representation systems. Listen and look for the combination of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic representations in the sequence. The sequence may work really well - or it may not. When you learn to track the sequence you will begin to know where and what to improve and just where to make the change so the strategy works really well and makes the person feel great at the same time.