(2198) EXPLORING THE BENEFITS OF VISUAL CODING STRATEGIES FOR L2, ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS WITH SPELLING DELAYS

摘要

Research confirms the multifaceted nature of spelling development and underscores the importance ofboth cognitive and linguistic skills that affect sound spelling development such as working and longtermmemory, phonological and orthographic awareness, mental orthographic images, semanticknowledge and morphological awareness. This has clear implications for many South African Englishsecond language spellers (L2) who attempt to become proficient spellers. Since English has anopaque orthography, with irregular spelling patterns and insufficient sound/graphemecorrespondences, L2 spellers can neither rely, nor draw on the phonological awareness skills of theirfirst language (for example Sesotho and many other African languages), to assist them to spell themajority of English words. Epistemologically, this research is informed by social constructivism.Besides this, the researchers also hypothesized that the principles of the 'overlapping waves theory'was an appropriate lens through which to investigate whether L2 spellers could significantly improvetheir spelling skills via the implementation of an alternative route to spelling development, namely theorthographic route, and more specifically via the application of visual imagery. Post-test resultsconfirmed the results of previous research that argues for the interactive nature of different cognitiveand linguistic systems such as working memory and its subsystems and long-term memory, aschildren were systematically guided to store visual orthographic images of words in their long-termlexicons. Moreover, the results have shown that L2 spellers in the experimental group significantlyoutperformed L2 spellers in the control group whose intervention involved phonological awareness(and coding) including the teaching of spelling rules. Consequently L2 children in the experimentalgroup significantly improved in all the post-test measures included in this study, namely, spelling andshort-term memory span.