Visual Spelling Strategy

During my formal teaching career it often astonished (and if I’m honest, once I knew about NLP, irritated) me that whilst a lot of spellings were given and marked and a great deal was talked about the difficulties a child might be experiencing with the spelling process, almost never was there any real quality information given to the HOW of spelling.

Spelling is a visual activity and whilst sound (phonics) is helpful in the initial stages, there comes a point at which the way a word looks becomes more important.  The English language is not a phonically regular system – think of the different spellings for ‘weight’ and ‘wait’.  Both have 3 sounds in them /w/ay/t  but the meanings are different as are the spellings.

Robert Dilts a pioneer in NLP Strategies, discovered that excellent spellers (not just good), excellent spellers would ’see’ the word in their mind’s eye and get a feeling whether it was spelt correctly or not.  Over the years I have had the opportunity to test this out for myself and I can now say that this has not only improved my own spelling, but is the ONLY way to teach spelling.

It’s not a magical cure – it can be – I have taught it to children and it has been little short of miraculous and sometimes it takes perseverance to re-programme old strategies, but happily NLP has many tools to help this process along.