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Doorway First Words is the second piece of software in the Doorway suite to come to the site;  www.doorwayonline.org.uk.

It presents pupiks with the opportunity to learn how to spell, and test their spelling of over 40 level A words. Those that can be represented by pictures.

The target words are CVC words, words woth ‘oo’ ee’, ‘ch’, ’sh’ and ‘th’. The on-screen keyboard includes ‘keys’ to represent these digraphs. The words are spoken by a recorded voice.

To keep up with developments. follow the Doorway News blog;

www.doorwayonline.org.uk/news

Here’s a new text that I collected from a dyslexic youngster recently – She is almost approaching nine years old with a reading age about the same, but comprehension well above this. She is in P4. She is trailing in spelling by about a year and two months

‘I put my foot dawn in froow the door. I was cold but my foot was lickr it was sumer. it was so I stept in. I sore buterflis in the garden I did not under stand it was winter  at home bet it was sumer at the garden.

I notest it was time for school. So I ran awte. So that I wood not be late wen I got to school  I told my frends abwte the garden. At the end fo school I went and shode them it thaye were ameramasd  at it so evry day we plade there. We went fishing, we plad tennis and bamigton.’

This pupil, clearly,  has a fair amount of phonic awareness. However she seems to have poor visual memory.  Just read the text out as she wrote it, especially – ‘I notest’. Yet this is a word that a standard spellchecker could not help her with.

Interestingly, the new Ghotit spellchecker scored well with this text – Microsoft Word fared less well! Here are the scores; 

• Ghotit; 18 corrections suggested  out of 21errors in the text.
• MS Word; 10 corrections suggested out of 21errors in the text

Remember that there are three real word errors in the text; ‘dawn’ for down; ’sore’ for saw; ‘bet’ for but. Only a spellchecker with context spellchecking can spot real word errors, which can be as common as 20% of some dyslexics’ spellimg errors.

Take a look at the trial version of Ghotit; www.ghotit.com

I expect that the release version of Ghotit will score 20 or 21 out of 21. It should do!