BOOK REVIEW

“Understanding and Teaching English Spelling”

Name : - Amina Madhani

- Cindy Nurlita

- Della Novita Fitriani

- Nurfadillah Isnaini

Group :C

Class : English Morning (Semester 1)

Subject : Receptive Written Language Skills

Lecturer : Semaria Eva Girsang, S.Pd.,M.Pd.

Book Title : Understanding and Teaching English Spelling

Writer : Adam Brown

Publisher : September 17, 2018 by Routledge, at New York

Review :

This 316-page book presents a wealth of information English language teachers can use to
understand and help them teach English spelling. It’s not the kind of book most people would read from
start to finish, although if you are particularly fascinated by the nuances and history of English spelling,
you might choose to do so.The book is divided into six sections: Background, Technology, Punctuation,
Features of Present-day English Spelling, Strategies for Teaching and Testing English Spelling, and The
Future. Each of these sections has a number of short chapters which teachers can read relatively quickly.
Where further information would be required, there are plenty of cross-references.Each chapter has
practical exercises to keep the reader engaged. In most cases, these exercises help reinforce the
information which has been presented, rather than provide “how-to” exercises, although Brown
suggests they can be adapted for classroom use. For example, in the chapter introducing punctuation,
there are some fun (unpunctuated) sentences for the listener to apply punctuation to, e.g. Lets eat
grandpa. And in the chapter Rules of English Spelling, the exercises are designed to illustrate the
author’s point, which is that there are different types of rules, and there are huge numbers of
exceptions to any rules which people have put together for English spelling.Although the book title is
Understanding and Teaching English Spelling, the book is heavy on the “understanding” part, and
relatively light on the “teaching” part. One could argue that a teacher needs to understand the
principles first, inorder to be able to then think independently and have insight into how to teach
spelling. While this is certainly true, a lot of teachers do like to get right to the “how-to” parts. Perhaps
the most practical chapters are found in section five, Strategies for Teaching and Testing English Spelling.
There are seven chapters, the first five of which cover morphological, etymological, phonological,
analogical and visual strategies. A teacher who understands these well could look at any one word a
learner was struggling with, and choose which of the strategies might help a learner most with that
particular word. Unfortunately, for a beginner teacher, the number of exceptions in any one strategy
could be discouraging. For example, at the end of the chapter on Analogical Strategy, Brown notes that
“...while grove patterns like stove, the less regular glove patterns like love and the very irregular prove
patterns like move” (p. 217).The Visual Strategy chapter provides a final thought for “when nothing else
works”. Either a word needs to be memorised as a sight word, or a mnemonic could be created. While
some of the mnemonics given as examples are amusing (Do In A Rush. Run Home, Or Expect Accident), I
find them a little complicated for non-native learners of English Spelling. Unless teaching advanced
learners, it would take more effort to teach the meaning of the words in these mnemonics, than it
would to just spend a few minutes with a flashcard, helping the learner to memorise the visual aspects
of the word.The final two chapters in this section are called Teaching English Spelling and Testing English
Spelling. Brown notes in the first that “It is not the intention of this book to provide a number of
classroom exercises aimed at teaching and practicing spelling. Many books on the subject already
exist...” (p. 229), and he goes on to list nine specific books, as well as suggesting the reader search for
“phonics” at an online bookstore. But he does go on to provide solid guidance for how to evaluate
whatever resources the reader finds, like ensuring the spelling system (British or American) is consistent
with the needs of your students, determining whether the materials are designed for native or non-
native students, and what ages the material is designed for. He also suggests that the teaching of
spelling should go hand-in-hand with the teaching of vocabulary, rather than necessarily in isolation, all
of which is solid advice for any classroom teacher. All in all, this book is best viewed as an extremely
thorough, academic resource to be consulted when a teacher needs to learn more about how English
spelling works, and how to teach it. It’s not a book which will provide tomorrow’s lesson plan, but it is a
book which will certainly provide plenty of “Aha!” moments.

Strongest :

The strength of this journal is that based on the ideas and ideas the author uses various and relevant
theoretical bases according to the problems studied in this study. In addition, the writing is structured
systematically, and the language used is easy to understand.The discussion is closely related to how the
role of teachers in developing moral values in students.
Weakness :

The weakness of this journal is that there is no presentation in the form of tables, graphs or image
documentation in this journal.Actually, this study aims to provide knowledge and descriptions to
teachers in order to develop oral values for students.

Implementation In Indonesian:

The visual strategy:

visual Adopting a visual strategy would simply mean to tell learners to learn the spelling by heart,
without any great reference to sound-letter correspondences. In this regard, it is interesting to note that
choir has a homophone, quire, mean- ing “24 sheets of paper.” In contrast to choir, the spelling of quire
is quite regular by English spelling patterns. The initial qu- represents /kw/ in many other words, e.g.
quality, queen, quick, quote. Similarly, the final -ire represents /aɪə(r)/ in many words, e.g. fire, hire,
spire, tire, wire.

Analogical strategy:

The analogical strategy works on the principle of relating unknown words and their spelling patterns,
with known words. As with many other aspects of spelling covered in this book, the analogical strategy is
only necessary because English does not have a good sound-spelling correspondence. In other
languages, with better correspondences.

Conclusion :

Teachers of elementary school students need to be creative to teach their students by using fun
techniques in the teaching process, especially while they are learning language. The most important
thing to learn language is learning the words or vocabulary.

Suggestion :

storytelling can be considered to be one of the fun techniques which can motivate the students.