Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

parts that concern spelling that I could find in The Adult ESOL Core Curriculum (DfES,
1999). The word ‘correctly’ appears in each level, the students being expected to go
from correct spelling of ‘personal key words’ at level 1, to ‘familiar common words’
at level 2, to ‘relevant key words’ at level 3; that is, the curriculum is dominated by
the meaning-based one-word-at-a-time route, with no use of spelling rules. The
other strand is an emphasis on legibility and proofreading. But that is all that is said
about a major component of English – not a curriculum that pays any attention to
the massive work done on the English writing system in the past few years.
Acquiring and teaching a new writing system
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Box 5.12 Adult ESOL Core Curriculum: Spelling (extract)
An adult will be expected to:
ENTRY LEVEL 1
ENTRY LEVEL 2
ENTRY LEVEL 3
spell correctly some 
spell correctly the 
spell correctly common 
personal key words 
majority of personal 
words and relevant 
and familiar words
details and familiar 
key words for work 
common words
and special interest
write the letters of 
produce legible 
proofread and correct 
the alphabet, using
text for grammar 
writing
upper case 
and spelling
produce legible 
text and lower case
Box 5.13 Writing systems and teaching
Teachers need to teach:
●
the type of writing system, direction, letter formation, and so on, to
students whose first writing system is different;
●
the rules and orthographic regularities of spelling;
●
the punctuation and capitalization rules;
●
individual spellings of frequent words and of frequently misspelt words.

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