Introducing and Investigating a New Micro-strategy for Teaching Spelling Patterns: Active Mental Photography

Abstract

Spelling has become a remarkable aspect of learning and/or teaching English as a foreign language. This skill helps learners to write fluently without interruption in the flow of thinking caused by searching dictionary for the correct spelling. However, the number of practical simple strategies to learn and/or teach spelling is scant. This study was an attempt to introduce a simple strategy to learn spelling and to investigate its effects on learners' progress in spelling. To this end, two groups of third grade students of secondary school were studied as control and experimental groups. A pretest was given, then the new strategy was used in the experimental group, and then a posttest was given, and finally the data were analyzed by using ANCOVA. The results showed that this new strategy of learning spelling has a positive effect on learners' spelling performance. Findings show that this simple strategy can be effective in learning and/or teaching spelling.