Children at conventional stage according to thoerists like Piaget,Bruner and Kolberg is generally around the ages of 9 - 12 years of age. These children are expected to already passed the pre-conventional stage and are now needed to develop phonic sounds . When writing their compositions and other language work they occassionally have misspelling problems. These problems range from pronunciation ,making verbs possessive nouns or nouns changed in verbs. They may also have problems of spelling the words with prefixes and suffixes. Long words with many letters or with double letters in it.and some of these words sound to be double letters with only a single letter.Usually pupils write these words with double letters instead of single letter or vice versa.
At conventional stage, the teacher must introduce children to a wide reading habits and the use of a dictionary to check some of the words with misspelling problems.Lets now below explore strategies the teacher can use to help children to reduce misspelling problems.
According to Temple(1986:35) spelling is arrangement of letters up into their components parts and grouping them in families according to their derivation. Dr Johnson quoted in Rowe (1980:30) says that,'spelling is combination of letters which have much effect on human happiness.'
Therefore in relation with these above authorities misspelling is the opposite of spelling which translate to improper arrangement of letters against word family combination which then produce the different or different sound to the reader.
For instance in English language spellings are purely product of different languages. Temple (1986:35)states that, English words derived from languages like latin,Greek,French and other European languages. Thereafter the English words have different sounds from letter sounds which pupils learned during their pre-conventional stages. In Zimbabwe children from Chishona dialect for instance when sounding letters use the sounds they used to in their dialect . In this case the English word with double 'ee' they pronounce 'i' that's 'meet ,succeed' they pronounce mit ,succid. These children again the words with 'ea' also sound 'i' like 'meat ,increase.'
The teacher should therefore help these children to spell these words correctly. How? The teacher can tasked children in their groups to write words which sound 'i' in letters 'ea ,ie,io,ei' .As they reportback the like (EAt ,mEAsure ,classifIEd ,liberatIOn ,thEIr ) are identified in different words.
According to Thompson (2001:46) teachers should model the process allowing students to see them writing on the charts or board. In using these media the teacher write on charts or board the words with letters like:(oBvious ,coUrse ,groUp) Pupils then clearly see the highlighted words and write them in their notebooks during the lesson.After a day or two the teacher then give them an exercise on spellings of words with silent letters.
The main emphasis is to let pupils hear the word sound and recite the spelling.In this way the teacher is familiarising pupils with words sound alike but spelt differently.(sheal and Omofuwa 1985:15) These words are called homophones.The words like (council /counsel ,meat/meet,it/eat ,ship/sheep) The teacher can group children into small groups and make use of these words in sentences. After that and series of discussions help children and can be given an exercise with blank spaces to feel with the right word according to the relevance of the sentence for example:'I --- porridge.(it/eat) John --- our visitors.(Meet/meat).The teacher can also use dictation after say out the sentence and repeat the word ,then pupils write the word repeated from the sentence.
Some children have problems of writing words like 'advise ,device,prophesy ,practise' as a noun.Rowe (1980)suggests on verbs which end with 'se' or 'sy' to end with 'ce' as a noun. After the teacher give a lesson on these words and discuss with children changing verbs into nouns. The exercise on verbs with 'se' tasked pupils to replace the suffixes 'se' with 'ce'.
There are many strategies the teacher can use which include individualisation where a child is asked to write list of own misspelt words and study independently or with classmates. In this case children outline confusing words with double letters and others without double letters.The list may comprise the words like:(accommodation,account,professional,succeed,feel).
The use of root word like 'spell ,nature,regular' In these words children can guided to use the prefixes like 'ir,mis ,un' As a language rule in spellings prefixes are added without dropping any letter ,for example 'misspelling,unnatural ,irregular 'The teacher must facilitates children to write root word and add prefix and suffix changed to antonum.The words:'like,spell,natural can be 'unlikely ,misspelling ,unnaturally'.
The strategies teachers can use are endless as the numerous of teachers around the world . Misspelling problems can easily solved by try and error experiments and the teacher can make sure that pupils are helped to solve misspelling problems.
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