Morphological Processing Strategies: An Intervention for Spelling Difficulties in English Language

The paper presents a descriptive account of a Morphological Processing Spelling Approach (MPSA), which substitutes a more conventional spelling instruction, proposed for developing primary school students’ metamorphological knowledge and strategies in English as a foreign language. For the application of the MPSA, seven dictation texts were carefully designed by the researchers, each one including a specific morphemic pattern recycled in ten different words. They were implemented in the 6th grade of an English primary school classroom during seven 45 minute sessions, carried out after the completion of every unit of the conventional English textbook. In this way, each dictation served as a recycling way of teaching inflexional and derivational morphemic patterns. In a guided participatory context, problem-solving spelling activities were performed in five basic steps, involving spellers, especially the struggling ones, into employing morphological processing strategies during sub- processes. It could serve as a supplementary strategy to learning to spell, a critical element of a comprehensive approach to spelling instruction, since MPSA is a flexible approach and can also incorporate the use of phonetic or visually-memory based spelling strategies.