Spelling Instruction at the Middle School Level Teachers’ Practices

Abstract

Due to the crucial role that spelling plays in developing language skills, especially writing and reading, and the difficulty of the English spelling system characterised by a host of orthographic inconsistencies, spelling instruction is of paramount importance to the English as a Foreign Language learners in their first years of instruction. The present study seeks to explore middle school teachers’ practices for teaching spelling to young learners in their early years of learning English as a foreign language in the Algerian context. Besides, it aims at finding out the different obstacles that middle school teachers encounter while teaching spelling. In order to achieve these aims and collect the required data, a teachers’ questionnaire was designed and administrated to 20 middle school teachers from different middle schools in the wilaya of Jijel during the academic year 2021-2022. The findings indicated that the teachers assigned importance to spelling as they reported teaching it systematically and regularly. Moreover, they emphasised that they gave priority to explaining the importance of spelling to the students as well as correcting the students’ spelling mistakes in various instructional activities. On the other hand, the findings also revealed that the teachers often rely on the same traditional practices while teaching spelling without relying on new strategies recommended by contemporary spelling research