The Impact of Different Teaching Strategies on Teaching Spelling to Kindergarten Children

Many specialists in the field of foreign language teaching consider spelling as an important and perhaps necessary part in language teaching, and observe that spelling is a significant concern among both the language arts community and the public. The teaching of spelling is an issue that provokes strong feelings and attitudes in teachers, students, and parents as well, and those involved have strong opinions about the importance of correct spelling at school. A close look at the role of spelling in the general language curriculum, makes it known that learning to write and read in the whole language can benefit greatly from teaching spelling. Searching the Net under the keywords ‘spelling’ and ‘teaching spelling’ reveals many studies on spelling and the interest of the readers. In this study, we made use of two techniques to teach spelling, which included “the Personalized Instruction Technique”, or simply the PI technique, and “the Detection Technique” or the D technique. Meanwhile, a control group was included to make up for and take into account any possible background differences.82 kindergarten children, studying at three kindergartens in Tarom, Zanjan, took part in the study. They were randomly assigned to three groups: one control group and two experimental groups. The PI group consisted of 28 kindergarten students both boys and girls, and the Group comprised 27kindergarten students, both boys and girls. The control group, too, contained 27 kindergarten students, both boys and girls. The findings indicated that both the experimental groups that used the spelling techniques performed significantly better than the control group. Meanwhile, the PI group exceeded the DT group.