Like most teachers, I started my career using the old method of teaching spelling. Each week I would make up or find in a book a list of spelling words to be learnt by the class or group. Each day a different learning activity would be employed and on Friday the children would be tested. There are lots of difficulties with teaching by this method – so many, in fact, that like most teachers I gave it up after a while and for a long time didn’t really work on spelling at all. Probably the main problem was the wasted effort. Despite the teacher’s efforts selecting appropriate words for the class, it was usually uncomfortably clear that the words which each individual needed to learn to spell were seldom included at the right time. It seems that for every ten words a child had in his list, four of them he already knew, four he didn’t know and didn’t need to know, one he learnt and forgot during the weekend, and only one survived. This is a perfect example of something being almost impossible to teach when it is divorced from the meaningful situation.

So it became clear to me that, although it was important to teach spelling, the traditional formal methods seemed not to work very well. Another more serious problem that I noticed, especially with Aboriginal children, was their inability or unwillingness to make a reasonable attempt at spelling words they didn’t know. If they wanted to spell a word, most of them had efficient ways of finding it – looking at yesterday’s stories, asking friends or the teacher – but few of them would actually sit down and think about the problem themselves. It never seemed to occur to them that spelling could be worked out with a bit of thought; to them the answer was always out there somewhere and had to be located. Even traditional methods of teaching spelling do little to help children use their own imagination and thinking power in spelling because the words to be learnt are still provided fron an external source, the teacher.

What I was looking for was a method that