Teaching ELL Students Spelling Rules, Essay Example

There are both advantages and disadvantages to teaching ELL students spelling rules. A major advantage is that educating them about these rules will help their ability to speak in English because their word recognition ability will increase. Eventually, this will enhance their potential to read and write more fluently. On the other hand, English spelling rules are complex and there are many exceptions to the rules, so teaching the rules could be potentially detrimental to the students’ ability to learn.

I believe that it is necessary to teach the rules to ELL students with the understanding that there are exceptions. The exceptions should be introduced to them early in the lessons so that they recognize these words by memory to prevent confusion. Furthermore, this approach will be reinforced by repeated in class reading sessions with discussions of words that the students believe have a confusing spelling. As the students continue to read in the English language, they will become more familiar with spelling and word patterns, and this should clarify a majority of the initial confusion over spelling rules.

I believe that phonics instruction is both effective and necessary for ELLs. A majority of the issues that language learners have in their studies of foreign languages is the ability to pronounce words like a native. Even when English speaking students take a foreign language class, they tend to pronounce the foreign words as if they were English. By doing so, these words lose meaning and may not be understood by a native speaker. Therefore, it is essential to couple phonics with word memorization to ensure that the language is spoken clearly and is thus understandable. Language is meaningless if it cannot be used properly.