Strategy: I chose to implement portions of Judy Kuisle’s (Dr. Robert Nash’s) "Pure/Complete Phonics" with my advanced ELL Business English class of seven Taiwanese, two Chinese, and one Malaysian student. The class meets 3 times a week (MWTh) for two hours each time. I was intrigued by Nash’s compilation from Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary of all the possible spellings of a sound. Advanced students struggle with the unusual spellings of rarer words, so I thought it might help them to go over some of the possibilities.

Collaborator: I chose to collaborate with Laurie Anderson, the lead teacher at our Learning Center who gave a presentation on our dyslexia program at the institute, since this is a different system designed to help dyslexic students.

Strategy Implementation: I began implementation on October 8th, after the class had seen most of the "Perfect English Pronunciation" videos during September, videos which detail how to say each of the consonants and vowels in American English. I chose to begin with Kuisle’s green Encoding (Spelling) sheets (pp. 23-26), which list the different ways English can spell some of the sounds they’d just heard. Kuisle only distributed the first 25 sounds, so we won’t be able to learn all the sounds of English. I also plan to skip the schwa sound, which has 27 different ways it can be spelled in English; it seems to me that would be more confusing than
helpful. We should have time to concentrate on one sound each day for the remainder of the semester.

Journal:
10/8: We started with short a, which has five spellings. Students can make this sound easily, so they were most interested in learning the new vocabulary of some of the example words ("plaid", "meringue", "Cheyenne").

10/10: With a dozen different spellings of the long A sound, this took awhile. Many of the less-frequent spellings are French-based, so they don’t make much sense according to the pronunciation rules for English which students have learned in lower-level classes in their home countries . We had done restaurant menu headings, though, so "entree" and crepe" were of interest.

10/11: We made up the extra time we had taken yesterday here, as there is apparently only one spelling of the schwa-M sound (e.g., mannerism).

10/17: Over the weekend, I had time to correlate the sounds on the sheets with the pronunciation video and discovered that the 5th, 6th, and 13th sounds were ones we hadn’t done on the video yet but were coming up soon, so I skipped sound sheets on Monday in order to coordinate with the video sounds slated for Wednesday: air, ar, and ear. This took a long time again, but we went over the sound sheets first, then looked for the different spellings in the example words presented on the video. I’m learning as I go along; next semester I’ll check the transcript of the video beforehand to see how many spellings are used each day in the examples. Then the whole process would make more sense, I think.

10/18: The 7th sound was just B, so we did the 8th as well (ch). That turned out to be serendipitous, as a couple of the vocabulary words the students used in class during presentations that day turned out to have the T spelling of that sound. "Statue" was the example on the sound sheet, but we also noted that spelling in "essential" and "spiritual".

10/22: I doubled up once again, since Sound 9 (d) only had two spellings. Sound 10, the short e, is a difficult one for Chinese speakers to say correctly, so the nine different possible spellings gave us time to practice the sound over and over again.

10/24: Sound 11 (x) was simple, so we did #12 as well (long E). Several examples of the rarer spellings became vocabulary words for the day as well (subpoena, fjord, etc.).

10/25: F and G, not much unknown here.

10/29: None of the gw- sounds are very common, so this whole week was fairly a pro forma presentation without much discussion; gua and gui today; gwe (linguine) and gwi (language and extinguish) on Wednesday, then gwi (guayabara) and gwo (guacamole) on the first.

11/5: The two x sounds didn’t elicit much conversation for the opposite reason -- the entire class knew and understood the sounds and spellings.

11/7: Sound 24 was a mixture: two of the possible spellings were well known (h and wh-) and the other two were virtually unknown (j and g). Students were interested in the Spanish spellings.

11/8: the last sound, short i, has many spellings and is difficult for many Taiwanese to pronounce correctly, so we spent considerable time on it.

11/12: I asked the class whether they thought the spelling sheets had been of any value. The Malaysian student (who spent her undergrad years in the US) said she felt they had helped her learn new spellings; others were non-committal. I handed out the Reading sheets and asked students to look them over, then asked them to tell me on Wednesday whether they wanted to continue on to the Reading sheets after they had had time to look them over.

11/13: I shared this journal with my collaborator.

Summary: This strategy has possibilities, but it would work better if I had access to all the sounds. I also need to explain and integrate it into the lesson plan better.