[senco-forum] Writing to a head about rights to withdraw

David wrote: "I wrote her a German spelling course to teach her German

> David wrote:   "I wrote her a German spelling course to teach her German
phonics explicitly and she got her expected "A" in GCSE writing after  a lot
of hard work."<

> Felicity wrote: "Would you be willing to share this  spelling course with
the forum? I advocate Dyslexic pupils do German not French in school but
I've never been able to offer this kind of support to our able dyslexics.It
sounds really useful especially as we teach  English spelling  phonetically
so they would be familair with the ideas.<

I'm happy to share this resource, Felicity. It's an 8-unit course and each
unit focuses on a category of German sounds, with emphasis on what makes
their written representation different from their hypothetical English
spelling. For example, the German word for "school" should be spelt
"Schule", not "shoole", as my student would spell them using English phonics
in early stages. This involved explaining how German represented the "sh"
sound by "Sch" and the the long "oo" sound by "u". German spelling is pretty
predictable, following clear logical rules with extremely few (and largely
ignorable) exceptions, so being a bright girl, she picked up the patterns
quite quickly. Each unit of my spelling "course" is more in the way of
lesson notes than a standalone worksheet for the student to work on
independently: I had to be there to deliver the lesson, which I was, working
with her on the computer using Word, so she could delete her mistakes
immediately when I pointed out any non-application of the German rules of
spelling and substitute her corrected answer. Here are the 8 units in PDF
format:

http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/mfl/year7german/spelling/

A bit of background. I did my degree course in French and German back in the
1960s and the phonetics of both languages was part of the course. I still
remember a lot of what I learnt then, because the course was very well
taught, both in scientific and practical terms. However, the course began
with the written form, which we linguists knew very well, through frequent
dictation exercises, and was designed to teach pronunciation, which tended
to be neglected in schools then. With the bilingual student, of course, this
position was reversed, and tricky pronunciations didn't always equate to
tricky spellings, or vice versa. So I did a lot of research online to
reacquaint myself with German phonetics and I also purchased from amazon.de
a phonics-based German spelling primer just to see how it was done in the
schools of the German-speaking world.

I also gave my student a brief introduction to German handwriting; there are
three official school cursive scripts (Schulschriften) in Germany alone:
Lateinische Ausgangsschrift (LA), Schulausgangsschrift (SA) and Vereinfachte
Ausgangsschrift (VA). We used a computer-based authentic German handwriting
font I had purchased online emulating one of the approved scripts, VA. One
version of the font came with the familiar gridlines to guide the hand
during copying practice. She seemed to enjoy the kinaesthetic appeal of
trying out what was for her a new handwriting style, which was another
element to renew her contact with the culture she had grown up with until
the age of six.

Hope that gives some idea of what I did. It was a steep, but succesful,
learning curve for both of us, but I feel I learned a great deal myself in
the process about phonics and its teaching in general as well as about
German phonics in particular.

David

David Wilson
Harton Technology College, South Shields
http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/