Both read­ing and spelling re­quire you to con­nect let­ters to speech sounds and to de­vel­op a vi­su­al mem­o­ry of the let­ters in words. How­ev­er, when you read, you see the let­ters and have to work out what the word is. You do the re­verse when you spell–you know what word you want to write and have to work out the let­ters.

Thus read­ing and spelling are dif­fer­ent skills. Read­ing us­es the skill of recog­ni­tion, while spelling re­quires re­call. You can com­pare it to phone num­bers. Spelling is sim­i­lar to when you try to re­mem­ber a phone num­ber, where you have to re­call each num­ber in its right po­si­tion. Read­ing is when you check your phone log and recog­nise the num­ber you were try­ing to re­mem­ber.

Since read­ing and spelling re­quire dif­fer­ent skills, you can be a good read­er but a poor speller.

The Al­ta spelling pro­gramme, which is geared to­ward our stu­dents who have com­plet­ed Lev­el Two of the pro­gramme, in­cor­po­rates and ex­pands on the spelling strate­gies and rules taught in Al­ta lit­er­a­cy pro­gramme.

To­day, we have a con­tri­bu­tion from one of our stu­dents, Mau­reen, who is a mem­ber of our Spelling Pro­gramme at St George's Col­lege in Barataria.

The ini­tial rea­son for my in­ter­est in Al­ta was as a form of sup­port for my broth­er, but then I thought that I could ben­e­fit from the pro­gramme as well. The ar­eas I need­ed help in were spelling and read­ing for un­der­stand­ing. I start­ed at Lev­el Two and pro­gressed to the Spelling Pro­gramme, which was most help­ful to me as it point­ed to the is­sues per­tain­ing to my spelling prob­lems.

With an em­pha­sis on phon­ics and the un­der­stand­ing of the com­po­si­tion of the Eng­lish lan­guage the pro­gramme taught me how to ap­ply the rules re­quired to en­able me to spell any word. Thus my spelling im­proved great­ly.

Through­out my aca­d­e­m­ic life I strug­gled with feel­ings of in­fe­ri­or­i­ty be­cause of my short­com­ings. My par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Al­ta pro­gramme has been a rich and re­ward­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. It has af­ford­ed me the op­por­tu­ni­ty to build self con­fi­dence. I can say that learn­ing has be­come an en­joy­able ex­pe­ri­ence rather than one of ne­ces­si­ty. I at­tribute my pos­i­tive ex­pe­ri­ence to the pa­tience, will­ing­ness and re­spect shown by the tu­tors re­gard­less of our lev­el.

At­tend­ing these class­es has al­so giv­en me the priv­i­lege of meet­ing new peo­ple and mak­ing friends. Our class was unit­ed in their ef­forts to help and sup­port each oth­er in achiev­ing our goals. What­ev­er ob­sta­cles you need to over­come in or­der to bet­ter your­self; do it.

You are nev­er too old and it is not too late to ac­com­plish your life's goals. The Al­ta pro­gramme is the ide­al foun­da­tion as a first step to un­der­stand­ing what is need­ed for self im­prove­ment. It will put you on the path to re­al­is­ing your po­ten­tial.

More in­fo.

Al­ta starts the Spelling Pro­gramme in Oc­to­ber af­ter new stu­dent reg­is­tra­tion in Sep­tem­ber. This gives po­ten­tial spelling stu­dents who are new to Al­ta the op­por­tu­ni­ty to spend four weeks in Lev­el 2 to check that Spelling Pro­gramme is their best Al­ta match. For more in­for­ma­tion on our spelling and oth­er pro­grammes give us a call at 624-2582.