Improving grade eight students' spelling performance with a triad strategy approach

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of explicitly teaching a triad of spelling strategies in comparison to traditional methods, to 26 Grade 8 students. The three explicitly taught strategies were error correction (with cloze procedure), imagery and analogy. The traditional instruction method included activities modelled after Grade 8 basal spellers. Students were seen in groups of thirteen for five weekly sessions of forty minutes. All students were pretested, posttested weekly, posttested immediately following the training sessions and posttested one mont? following the training. The pretest, weekly posttests and immediate posttest were dictated words spelling tests of both the training and transfer words. The one month delayed posttest was a dictated contextual sentence spelling test. Performance scores on the pretest and posttest measures were compared to determine if any differences existed between the two groups using the Dunnett procedure. Results indicated that no significant differences were found between the strategy instruction and the traditional instruction groups for the training words. However, a significant difference favouring the strategy instruction group existed on transfer words at the immediate posttest. On a secondary analysis of the data this significant difference existed at the delayed posttest. When learning growth was measured from pretest to delayed posttest, the strategy instruction group significantly outperformed the traditional instruction group with respect to correctly spelling transfer items.