October 23, 2007
Not all spellcheckers are equal. The last comparative study of spellcheckers that I am aware of was published as a study by the CALL Centre, Edinburgh University. I made a small contribution to the Document; Supportive writing software. The performance of various spellcheckers can be found here.
Take a look at the graphs on pp. 144 & 145.
To try out a spellchecker you need texts written by youngsters with literacy difficulties. You’ll find some here
The intention is that you can copy and paste these texts into a word processor and see whether the author of that text is likely to be an effective user of a spellchecker.
There is also a printable version of some of the texts here.
Here is another text, written by a pupil with dyslexic style difficulties. He was in P6 and he had a reading and spelling age both at least two years below his chronological age
How to bild a longhouse
It shod be hiy abuv water anb flat lanbscap.
Then to cut don the tree for the longhouse and the tools will be a acx and ads and laders lumberjacs. Mijer the lenths of the wood stics and logs to mace the wals and to poot watil and dob is a clay ,hare, muck .
Sume house have turf or fahc for turf you ned to get sum grass for the roof and mace som laders ut of wood. Lev a holl in the top of the roof to let smock escap.
There are 8 real word errors; ’shod’ for should; ‘mace’ for make; smock for smoke, etcOf the remaining errors the spellchecker in MS Word suggested the target word in 13 cases while it failed to suggest the word in 6 cases.
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Posted by ictsan
October 19, 2007
Teachers need to be very clear why they are using a particular strategy with a pupil with spelling difficulties. There is a range of approaches that are aimed at improving a pupil’s awareness of phonics, word attack skills and fluency including
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Sherston Rhyme and Analogy Software
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Look, say, cover, write and check software -such as Starspell
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Bordertalk
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The Electronic Library
There is also a selection of methods which aim to circumvent the pupil’s difficulties
There is no evidence that the latter can actually improve a pupil’s performance in spelling as the former can be expected to. A salutary reminder was given in an article by American teacher, Charles MacArthur, http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/technology/word_prediction.html> which concluded;
“An important limitation of both word prediction and spell checking is that neither appears to have much impact on students’ independent spelling skills, at least in the short run. When Thomas and his classmates returned to using the standard word processor, their performance declined to baseline levels. Thus, along with these assistive technologies, teachers need to provide instruction in spelling and other basic writing skills. In addition, teachers and instructional designers could work on the development of instructional methods that integrate instruction in basic skills with assistive technologies.”
(This link no longer leads to the article)
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Posted by ictsan
I am gradually moving to this site, the blog that I started here; 