Qu 1: Student Inquiry Foci...

This year Dianne Fisi'iahi and I will be undertaking a collaborative inquiry. What this will look like exactly at this stage is still on the drawing board although we do know our purpose. This year we want to find out if a focus on spelling conventions will foster an environment where word consciousness strengthens connections to the learning.

We teach a Year 7/8 class with 40 learners, all who bring a wide a varied connection to the conventions of spelling to the table. We know from past experience and from what we have observed so far this year, that our learners physically stop writing, stop reading and avoid sharing back to the class when they lose the connection to words needed to continue to make sense of the learning. There are many reasons as to why this happens but rather than focus solely on that, we want to focus on how we can prevent this pattern from continuing to evolve into a hurdle that is too challenging to get over. Our thinking is that if we begin to develop these skills and understandings, the transition to language of instruction used in Y9 may be strengthened by stronger connection to word knowledge.

Having decided on our inquiry focus this year, Dianne and I spoke with Anna Salmon, our Reading Recovery teacher about the barriers children in the junior school face with spelling, and how she helps the students she is working with to overcome these barriers. We came away from a very rich learning conversation with lots of ideas to pull together a tentative pathway forward. Here are the notes we made to help us formulate a plan going forward

'Word consciousness involves being aware and interested in words and word meanings (Anderson & Nagy, 1992; Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2002) and noticing when and how new words are used (Manzo & Manzo, 2008). Individuals who are word conscious are motivated to learn new words and able to use them skilfully '(Sourced here). Our challenge now is to find out why the links in the chain appear to be broken again. Last year I began my inquiry by getting to know my learners as readers through a survey. This year we plan to use this strategy to get to know our learners as spellers. To do this we will be looking at shift or change in:

• Disposition
• Data
• Word consciousness
• Student voice
• Strategies used to make sense of new or unfamiliar words

Further Reading/PLD to grow my own knowledge kete:

• Supporting students to become competent and confident spellers - Louise Dempsy

• Literacy Lines
• Learning during read-alouds: word consciousness
• Building Vocabulary Knowledge: What Does It Mean to Know a Word?
• Fundamental Spelling Rules for Everyone to Know
• The Vocabulary-Rich Classroom: Modeling Sophisticated Word Use to Promote Word Consciousness and Vocabulary Growth