Capturing variations in how spelling is taught in primary school classrooms in England

Mastering spelling is important for children to progress in writing. The National Curriculum in England details spelling lists linked to each year group in primary education. Assessment practices also emphasise the importance of teaching spelling. However, to date, little is known about how teachers feel about teaching spelling nor the instructional methods that they use in primary schools in England. This study addresses this gap by investigating approaches to teaching spelling. An online survey was distributed to primary‐based teaching staff with roles in supporting teaching and learning. The survey asked for information about the respondents' teaching experience and school setting, and about their attitudes and approach to teaching spelling. The survey was completed in full by 158 respondents. Approaches to teaching spelling were varied and over two‐thirds of the sample highlighted that their school did not have a spelling policy. The importance of explicit teaching of spelling was supported by the majority of teachers. This judgement was more frequent and rated more highly by teachers supporting younger children. Teachers largely reported devising their own spelling resources, highlighted that the curriculum spelling lists lack guidance for teaching spelling strategies and questioned their suitability for pupils of varying abilities. A range of spelling programmes and strategies were recorded. The findings provide insight into universal instructional approaches. Practical implications for teacher training and professional development are discussed. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Preliminary Indicators of EFL Essay Writing for Teachers' Feedback Using Automatic Text Analysis

During the pandemic of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), English as a foreign language (EFL) students have to study and submit their assignments and quizzes through online systems using electronic files instead of hardcopies. This has created an opportunity for teachers to use computer tools to conduct preliminary assessment of the students' writing performance and then give advice to them timely. Hence, this paper proposed some indicators which were essay readability scored by Flesch Reading Ease (FRE), length of essays, errors in writing and a method to assist the teachers in providing writing feedback to the students. The results showed a large difference in FRE, the number of words, sentences, paragraphs and errors. The K-means clustering findings were applied to classify groups of students based on writing proficiency indicators. The findings also revealed that the number of words and sentences in the essays indicated some deficiencies. The concept of paragraph should be reinforced while some specific errors such as misspelling, grammatical and typographical errors found need to be eliminated. This study showcased that the computer tools should be integrated to process the students' essays so that the teachers can pinpoint the problems and make suggestions to their students in appropriate time. Lastly, the results can be served as the guidelines for the teachers to develop and adjust teaching materials pertinent to writing to enhance the writing performance of EFL learners.

Docklands Primary School, Melbourne, Australia

Docklands Primary School opened its doors in Melbourne in January 2021. In this case study, Emina McLean, Head of English, describes how Sounds-Write was implemented in Foundation to Year 2 in the middle of the pandemic. Despite four lockdowns forcing periods of online teaching, various standardised tests show 80% of students on average meeting or exceeding expectations. [For the complete volume, "Systematic Synthetic Phonics: Case Studies from Sounds Write Practitioners," see ED619956.]

Systematic Synthetic Phonics: Case Studies from Sounds-Write Practitioners

Sounds-Write is a systematic synthetic phonics approach that has been successfully used to teach students to read and spell for the last two decades. This volume brings together twelve case studies -- written by practitioners -- of implementation of the Sounds-Write programme in different settings and geographical contexts (Europe, US, Australia). Through them, the authors share their experiences and evidence-based evaluations of the programme, as well as recommendations on how to make the most of what Sounds-Write has to offer. [This content is provided in the format of an e-book. Individual chapters are indexed in ERIC.]

Teaching Spelling through Instagram : Spanish Language in the High School Classroom

Instagram has revolutionized the way in which young people relate to each other. However, its use is often penalized in educational centers, making its presence as an educational tool in the subject of Spanish Language and Literature scarce. To propose improvements, we carried out a case study focused on spelling with students in their 4th year of secondary education. Three mixed groups from a public school (seventy-one students in total) participated in the study. The results of the spelling activity show that the students of these educational levels (14 and 15 years old) are more receptive to integrating spelling when examples and explanations are found on Instagram. Our work is an invitation for teachers to accept and incorporate the educational potential of social networks as a strategy that improves students’ learning and increases their motivation.

Effective Preprocessing and Normalization Techniques for COVID-19 Twitter Streams with POS Tagging via Lightweight Hidden Markov Model

The major focus of this research work is to refine the basic preprocessing steps for the unstructured text content and retrieve the potential conceptual features for further enhancement processes such as semantic enrichment and named entity recognition. Although some of the preprocessing techniques such as text tokenization, normalization, and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging work exceedingly well on formal text, it has not performed well when it is applied into informal text such as tweets and short messages. Hence, we have given the enhanced text normalization techniques to reduce the complexity persist over the twitter streams and eliminate the overfitting issues such as text anomalies and irregular boundaries while fixing the grammar of the text. The hidden Markov model (HMM) has been pervasively used to extract the core lexical features from the Twitter dataset and suitably adapt the external documents to supplement the extraction techniques to complement the tweet context. Using this Markov process, the POS tags are identified as states of the Markov process, and words are the desired results of the model. As this process is very crucial for the next stage of entity extraction and classification, the effective handling of informal text is considered to be important and therefore proposed the most effective hybrid approach to deal with the issues appropriately.

Children's Impressions of Early Spelling Assessment through Handwriting on Tablets vs. Paper-based Method

Traditional paper-based children's spelling assessments were hampered due to Covid-19 because existing technologies did not provide strategic signals to teachers, such as the child's handwriting direction and how they read what they write. Our project emerged as a novel method to assess children's spelling by touchscreens in this context. Hence, this paper aims to extend community knowledge concerning children's experience and perception of handwriting spelling on tablet devices. The experiment consisted in presenting three handwriting methods (paper and pencil, finger and pen writing) and was conducted with eight Brazilian children between 4.5 and 7 years old. In addition to observation, in our experimental protocol we adopted the Fun Sorter, Again-Again Table, and the Smileyometer as evaluation tools. Our results show children were excited about handwriting using a touch pen on the tablet. Most of them even revealed they prefer the pen tablet mode to the traditional paper and pencil mode. However, the majority of children did not feel comfortable writing by finger, and it required more time than other methods. Furthermore, we observed child's handwriting using finger looks different when compared to paper and pencil, while the tracing using a touch pen is similar to the registration produced on paper. © 2022 Owner/Author.

The Importance of Culturally-Situated Design on Children’s Interaction with Speech-Enabled Features in an Online Spelling Tutor

Spelling is an essential anchor for literacy skills. In the Caribbean, there are limited resources to support struggling readers with their spelling practice. This paper describes an exploratory study of an online Spelling tutor, Ozzypi which was built in response to Covid-19 related school closures across the region and the subsequent need for novel approaches to facilitate spelling practice. It has since been transformed to feature an intelligent tutoring system core that supports children in spelling practice exercises using speech-enabled technologies. Twenty-eight users (14 learners and 14 parents/guardians) from Trinidad and Jamaica used a basic version of the tutor over several weeks. Analysis of interview responses and logged usage data revealed broad learner and parent engagement, positive shifts in on-task behaviour. Importantly, the need for a culturally-situated design emerged as students interacted with the speech-enabled features. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Categorizing Telemedicine Visits Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

Objectives: Telemedicine visits increased recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however a discreet telemedicine indicator is not present in some Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) were to build a model to categorize patient visits to better understand telemedicine utilization. Methods: Initially, encounter type, note type, chief complaint, and appointment type were features used to categorize 389,315,647 visits spanning the last 14 years in an ambulatory EHR dataset. Each feature was filtered based on a list of 21 inclusion and 29 exclusion words or word chunks, as well as 7 CPT codes, 23 SNOMED codes, and 9 HCPCS codes. A clinician tagged each feature as indicating telemedicine or not. A predictive ML model was trained. Data was preprocessed by removing identifying features and punctuation, spelling correction, flagging negated words, and lemmatizing. Each feature was converted into unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams, and transformed with a TFIDF-vectorizer. The model was fit on a XGBoost ML model. The model tagged each feature as either 0 (not telemedicine) or 1 (telemedicine). Visits had multiple features that were conflicting. To determine if the whole visit was telemedicine or not, visit tie-breaking features were added if documented: vitals, labs, and medications prescribed. A rules-based model was created and applied to categorize the whole visit as telemedicine, not telemedicine, or not enough information. The visits were then re-evaluated by clinicians to determine overall model fitness. Results: In total, the model had an accuracy of 99.86% with an F1 score of 96.99%. There were 577% (3,450,561) more telemedicine visits since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic than the sum of all previous telemedicine visits combined (597,410). Conclusions: A mixture of ML and rules-based methods successfully categorize visits as telemedicine visits. Further studies stratifying on telemedicine and non-telemedicine visits can now be done.

Experiences of Application of Zoom Application in Higher Education on Examples of Teaching Mother Tongue Spelling

The paper analyzes the advantages of the usage of the Zoom application in teaching and learning process during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the examples of good practice in teaching mother tongue spelling.It also reviews the current perception of the disadvantages of online teaching, citing the challenges posed by the sudden transition from traditional to online work format, due to the unpreparedness of the educational system and reference legislation. It is stated and exemplified that the mentioned type of teaching provided the necessary tools for combining appropriate teaching methods, thus achieving the primary outcomes which are reflected in the acquisition of knowledge of spelling and the improvement of positive orthoepic and orthographic habits. It is concluded that it is necessary to include the Distance Learning System in the forthcoming reaccreditation process, as well as to define the ways of its incorporation into the “classical” form of teaching, which will have to be supported by adequate legal norms. It is also concluded that teaching through the Zoom application intensified the two-way teaching process, encouraged the development of digital competencies of its participants and raising them to a more advanced level. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Fuzzy Representations

[...]language (L2) learners typically have considerably less experience using their L2 than their L1. Explicit learning is essential in consolidating new explicit memories, particularly episodic or declarative memories that allow us to learn new vocabulary or to recognize new objects or concepts and to bind their features cross-modally (think of your initial fast-mapping of the concept of COVID-19, images of the spikes on the coronavirus, the spoken word-form as you heard the morning news…) Ellis (2002) reviewed the evidence of frequency effects in the learning and processing of all levels of language representation: phonology and phonotactics, reading, spelling, lexis, morphosyntax, formulaic language, language comprehension, grammaticality, sentence production, and syntax.

Supporting Young Students' Word Study During the COVID-19 Quarantine: ABC Scavenger Hunt.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected U.S. schools since March 2020. K-12 schools have put in place various forms of remote learning to continue the education of students. In trying times like these, young students face unique unprecedented challenges. Often, they need parents' and/or guardians' supervision and guidance at home. How can teachers work with young students and their parents or guardians to ensure high-quality and equitable teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic? More specifically, how can teachers support young students' word study from home during trying times? An ABC scavenger hunt can be a great activity to support young students' word study while bridging home and school and fostering a positive home learning environment. We share teaching tips developed by a first-grade teacher over the past several months.

An evidence-based synthesis of instructional reading and spelling procedures using telepractice: A rapid review in the context of COVID-19.

BACKGROUND: Due to COVID-19, many educators and allied health practitioners are facing the challenge of rapidly transitioning to telepractice delivery of instructional reading and spelling procedures without being fully informed of the evidence. AIMS: A rapid review was conducted to provide educators, allied health practitioners and policymakers with a synthesis of valid, relevant and actionable evidence relating to telepractice delivery of instructional reading and spelling procedures. The aim was to investigate the nature and outcomes of studies examining instructional reading and spelling procedures delivered via telepractice to school-aged students. METHODS & PROCEDURES: A rapid review was undertaken in accordance with the eight-step process published by the Cochrane Rapid Reviews Methods Group. Medline (all databases), Embase, Cochrane and ProQuest Central were systematically searched with predefined search terms organized across four key concepts relating to the research questions. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Nine studies were included in this rapid review. Reading and spelling instruction and intervention using telepractice can be feasible and engaging. Telepractice assessment for reading and spelling can be equally effective as onsite assessment. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The evidence base for telepractice delivery of reading and spelling procedures is in its infancy in terms of both the quantity and the quality of the evidence. Insufficient evidence exists to draw clear conclusions about its efficacy, and therefore practitioners should proceed cautiously. What this paper adds What is already known on the subject For onsite delivery, evidence-based reading and spelling assessment, instruction and interventions delivered by educators and allied health practitioners have been shown to accelerate students' skills; less is known about the efficacy of instructional reading and spelling procedures in a telepractice model, which have rapidly become the new norm in many countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The benefits of telepractice include improved access to services, increased service availability, convenience, time efficiency, caseload management efficiency and removal of logistical barriers relating to cost and geographical location. During the COVID-19 pandemic, telepractice has facilitated continued access to services. What this study adds to existing knowledge Reading and spelling instruction and intervention delivered via telepractice can be feasible and engaging. Telepractice is a viable mode to deliver reading and spelling assessments with strong agreement between telepractice and onsite scores. Given their low methodological quality, the studies in this review provide valuable information around the how of telepractice reading and spelling procedures and highlight the factors that may contribute to positive outcomes with this service delivery model. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Educators and allied health practitioners need a thorough understanding of the student's telepractice environment and require adequate training and support to engage in telepractice service delivery. Educators and allied health practitioners should consider students for telepractice on a case-by-case basis. Practitioners should proceed cautiously with telepractice reading and spelling assessment, intervention and instruction, with the knowledge that the current available evidence is of limited quality.