THE EFFECTIVENESS OF EXPLICIT TEACHING OF WORDS USED IN CHILDRENS STORY BOOKS IN ENHANCING STUDENTS SPELLING SKILLS

LELA MISHARA BINTI A GHANI

A RESEARCH FOR THE DEGREE OF B. ED.(TESL)(HONS)

Faculty of Education and Language

2011

Faculty of Education and Language HBEF2503(SMP) RESEARCH METHOD IN EDUCATION

TITLE: THE EFFECTIVENESS OF EXPLICIT TEACHING OF WORDS USED IN CHILDRENS STORY BOOKS IN ENHANCING STUDENTS SPELLING SKILLS

PREPARED BY: LELA MISHARA BINTI A GHANI MATRIX #: 800515025422002 NRIC #: 800515-02-5422 TEL. #: 019-4250730

PREPARED FOR: MADAM SRI RANJANI NAIDU

LEARNING CENTRE: KEDAH DARUL AMAN

SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ABSTRACT CHAPTER 1: RESEARCH PROBLEMS 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Background of the Research 1.3 Statement of Problem 1.4 Conceptual Framework 1.5 Aims of the Research 1.6 Significance of the Study 1.7 Limitation of the Research 1.8 Definition of Terms 1.9 Summary CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Related Literature 2.3 Related Research 2.4 Need for Spelling Skills 2.5 Summary CHAPTER III: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Research Design 3.3 Population and Sample 3.4 Research Instruments 3.5 Data Collection Procedure 3.6 Data Analysis 3.7 Summary REFERENCE APPENDICES

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ABSTRACT The ability to spell words correctly is an important foundation skill require for pupils to be an effective writer. As we knew, book is one of the objects that could change a person. Research indicates that through explicit teaching strategies such as visualization, analogy, mnemonic and morphemic knowledge can assist the pupils to cement the orthographic pattern of words in the mental lexicon. This study will examine whether using explicit teaching of story books series to a group of six year five pupils from a class of sample can improve their spelling accuracy in isolation and in prose. There will be five lessons using various explicit teaching which focus on using strategies of reading story books strategies where appropriate during the engagement. The activities are design to engage the cognitive, emotional and spatial part of the pupils brain. The specific words that are taken from the story books were used because they deem to be in pupils knowledge zone. In each lesson the target words will be say, read, written and use during the engagement. Each session follows a familiar format to develop a sense of familiarity, the rotation of activities will be vary and design to be stimulating, fun and engage a variety of multiple intelligence. The study will compare the pupils performance through their written tasks as document analysis. The pre-test and post-test will be conduct by the researcher before and after the five lessons and interviews will be done after the five lessons. The data from these three instruments will be triangulate to see the equivalent of the respondents responses and feedbacks. All data will be analyze to see pupils feedback and progress and the responses made will support the finding and in making the research report in chapter four. Hopefully, this study will show that pupils spelling skills will improve after they have been exposed to the explicit teaching tasks which engage their auditory, visual and kinesthetic learning style.

CHAPTER I RESEARCH PROBLEM 1.1 Introduction The major concern of primary school teachers is the teaching of spelling. Teachers are puzzle when pupils spell words correctly on daily lessons and misspell the same words in their written work. According to Philip Distefano and Patricia Hagerty (1983), the research in spelling was fairly clear about the major components of a good spelling program. They list down three of them; first was a list of high-frequency words, the second was efficient procedures by which the words are taught and the third one is an effective method for students to use when learning how to spell words (Hinrichs, 1975 cited in Philip and Patricia). According to him again, the spelling program must be supplemented with the development of a spelling consciousness, the ability to use dictionaries for spelling and a great deal of writing (Hillerch, 1977 cited in Philip and Patricia). The primary teacher in Malaysia context can determine for themselves whether a particular program used effective procedures or not. Primary school teachers are influence by the used of spoon-feed method in working on pupils spelling correction instead of using selfcorrected or test-study-test method as suggested by scholars. Teacher can also determine if the story books promotes an effective method for teaching the pupils how to study words. In some circumstance, it was difficult for them to know whether the words were high-frequency or not. The major concern of this study was to determine whether the selected story books use words familiar with the words in wordlist of the primary school English language specification. A second purpose of this study is to determine whether the pupils misspell words they have learn in their writing.

1.2 Background of the Research Keith W. Wright (2010), being able to spell English competently and confidently can be a major challenge for many learners. There are a number of reasons why spelling can be problem, and a primary one is a lack of knowledge about sounds that the symbol combinations in words can make. Keith added, the underlying reason is that one of the characteristics of the English language is that many symbol combinations can make more than one sound. For example, the a sound in mad /md/ changes in made /med/. Likewise, ar in car /kr / and canary /kne.ri/ ear in bear /ber / and learn /ln/. Another attribute is that many different symbols and symbol combinations can make the same sound as in k in kangaroo and c in cat en in ten and an in many air in chair and are in hare. Unfortunately, these important characteristics are not always taught in schools. According to Thomas Horn (1969), the important of high-frequency words in spelling program is widely recognized. He reported that, there is as yet no field-tested substitute for direct instruction on the basic core of high-frequency words need in child and adult writing. Thomas statement was supported by Fitzsimmons and Loomer (1978), they adviced that the spelling words of highest frequency in child and adult writing should be studied by elementary school children. Hinrichs (1975), supported the statement made by both studies, they reported that a good spelling program should concentrate on teaching children to spell words of highest frequency in writing of both children and adult. Hillerich (1977) agreed with Horn and Wenzel (1977) assured that teachers should choose high frequency words for children to learn to spell.

1.3 Statement of the Problem This research is to prove that explicit teaching of words found in the children story books help to enhance pupils spelling skills in English language production skills especially in writing. Pupils performances can only be seen in through their written works, if teacher considers speaking as another skills to make an evaluation on spelling, teacher might find the difficulties. In tracing pupils mistakes in spelling through speaking teacher might came to its limit because we can only correct pupils orally but not in prose or written work where teacher can directly correct pupils spelling by proofreading. We write for different purposes such as giving information, for entertainment and for social needs. Wilson, Bradley and Reese 1985, Bruck (1988), most pupils with learning disabilities had difficulty with all form of written expression, spelling problems rank as some of the most difficult to remediate and were common. An explanation for why L2 learners have difficulties in spelling was that they are less adapt than pupils in general education in devising and utilizing spelling strategies that allow for systematic application of spelling rules. As Bailet and Lyon (1985) suggested, deficient rule application either alone or in combination with other processing difficulties, can cause spelling difficulties. Similarly, Bruck (1988) had argued that disable spellers do not use their knowledge of sound letter correspondence rules when spelling unfamiliar words. To better understanding why pupils with learning disabilities have spelling problems, it is important to identify the strategy used when they attempt to spell words. It is equally important to find the most effective approaches for teaching spelling. There is a growing awareness that for instructional models to be effective with pupils having learning difficulties, academic program must be tailor specifically to meet the needs of the pupils of those students (Darch and Simpson, 1990). The pupils in Malaysian context receive very little formal instruction in spelling. Other factors due to spelling problem are lack of experiences, lack of vocabulary and lack of reading skills. The aim of KBSR is teaching pupils to develop all the four language skills to help pupils to be a competent user of English language. Realizing the above objectives, the educational developers have draft out list of skills and vocabularies according to topic or certain themes from pre-school to higher secondary level pupils. The issue here is, are English teachers in Malaysia competent enough to design lessons appropriately according to the need of the pupils?

1.4 Aims of the Research The aim of this study is to determine the effectiveness of employing explicit teaching of words in childrens stories to enhance pupil's spelling ability. The pupils are able to write words through spelling activity and take dictation correctly without mistakes.

1.4.1 Research Objective The research objectives is to determine whether explicit teaching of words in childrens stories can be utilized in an ESL classroom of pupils of intermediate proficiency level of Year 5 pupils of SK Long Boh to enhance their ability.

1.4.2 Research Questions i. Can explicit teaching of words used in the childrens stories enhance pupils spelling skills? ii. Can pupils dictation skills be improved through explicit teaching of words from childrens stories?

1.5 Significance of the Study The objectives of this study was to enhance pupils language skills and cognitive skills which offer them motivations in learning on how to learn the effective way. It was hoped that the outcome of the study will provide the best and effective ways for teachers as guidelines in enhancing pupils language skills especially in writing. According to Keith W Wright (2010), to be able to write well, learners need to spell well and to be able to spell well, learners need to be skilled at the art of conversion, to be able to convert the sounds learners hear when a word is spoken to their correct symbols and symbol combinations. To be a competent reader learners must apply this ability in reverse and be able to convert the symbols and the symbols combinations they sees or encounters in words to their correct sounds. To be skilled at both aspects, learners firstly needs to know the various sounds that the 26 alphabetic symbols and the many symbol combination can make. He added, in order to be a competent user of the language, learners need to know all the English language characteristics and English teacher need not abandon those characteristics in teaching and learning which suggested by Keith as a basic to language skills.

1.6 Conceptual Framework Childrens Story Books + Explicit Teaching

Reasons Lots of high-frequency words Attract pupils to read Big font size Arouse pupils interest Focus on Pupils Spatial and Cognitive Area

Activities (Oral Activities) Shared Reading Drilling on words (Writing Activities) Pre-test (Scrambled Words) Make words out of the letters in the boxes Make as many words as you can out of the given letters Complete the square to form 4 words Form other words from a long word Dictation Post-test (Scrambled Words)

Teaching

Teaching

Data Collection Interview (Pupils) Document Analysis (Pupils) Pre-test and Post-test (Pupils) Determine the effectiveness of explicit teaching of words used in childrens story books in enhancing pupils spelling skills.

1.7 Research Importance This research is to see how effective of explicit teaching in enhancing pupils spelling skills through the words use of childrens stories. This study also to find the suitability of the childrens stories from one publisher in enhancing pupils spelling skills. Mostly, words uses in the childrens stories are of high-frequency words. Basically, the authors of the childrens stories have identified and make research before they publish such story books. Based from the fact, the researcher will choose childrens stories which was suggested by the Curriculum Development Division (2008), the program namely The English Hour was suggested by Dr. Rohani Abdul Hamid in 2001 monitored by Ministry of education. There is only few selected school that have run the program and there have been a progress shown by the year one pupils in reading and writing skills, but in some circumstance the program was again being abandon because the pioneer teachers were transferred to other school. All over 94 books supplied to those schools are kept in school library without further practice on the usage of it according to the program. This research is trying to dig and reuse those childrens story books to build the pupils ability to read and write in English with confidence as in the English Language syllabus for primary schools which aims to equip learners with basic skills and knowledge of the English language so as to enable them to communicate, orally and in writing. In line with the aims, this research will be implemented to a class of mix ability level of pupils to see the effectiveness of the words used in childrens stories in enhancing pupils spelling skills in writing words and taking dictation.

1.8 Definition of Terms 1.8.1 Explicit Teaching Refer to direct instruction of a skill-set using lectures or demonstrations of the material, rather than exploratory models such as inquiry-based learning. This method is often contrasted with tutorials, participatory classes, discussion, recitation, seminars, workshops, observation, case study, active learning, practical or internships. Usually it involves some explication of the skill or subject matter to be taught and may or may not include an opportunity for student participation or

individual practice. Some direct instruction is usually part of other methodologies, such as athletic coaching. 1.8.2 High-Frequency Words High-frequency words are the words that appear most often in printed materials and spoken language. According to Robert Hillerich(1977), Just three words I, andand the account for ten percent of all words in printed English. Highfrequency words are hard for my students to remember because they tend to be abstract, say first grade teacher Kathy Chen. They cant use a picture clue to figure out the word with. And phonics clues dont work either. Learning to recognize high-frequency words by sight is critical to developing fluency in reading. Kathy explains, Recognizing these words gives students a basic context for figuring out other words. Once they recognize the, they can predict with amazing accuracy what the next word will be. 1.8.3 Shared-Reading Shared-reading is a reading activity where a teacher reads a story while a group of learners look at the text being read and follow along. Shared-reading is useful for, encouraging prediction in reading, helping new readers and writers learn about the relationship between print and speech, informally introducing print conventions, providing an enjoyable learning experience and teaching sight vocabularies. 1.8.4 Dictation The act of dictating a text or letter or of writing down what being dictated. For example, the pupils writing of words spoken, a test or exercise of language comprehension in which pupils write down words spoken aloud by a teacher. Example, words written down that has been dictated. 1.8.5 Drilling An activity which is practices of particular skill and often involves repeating something several times to make one remember certain concept or memorizing. The activity works by doing it again and again. For examples, spelling words and memorizing math formula.

1.9 Limitation of the Research The research is a preliminary study on how explicit teaching childrens stories enhance pupils spelling skills. Results from the samples of the study only provide an overview of how pupils response to explicit teaching of the story books strategies. It is incapable in defining the definite answers and how reliable the findings were. The limitation of this research restricts any generalization on the explicit teaching strategies of other learners in the class. This research only applicable to that few pupils observed and interviewed. Without more data and input, it cannot be determined whether gender or other factors relating to the competency of the pupils. The research will be done in the researcher school only. Pupils come in different culture, with different personalities, different abilities and multipleintelligence. The focus of this study involves only at one school. Pupils which are select as experimental subjects may include those with lack of reading or pronunciation skills and this will definitely pose as an obstacle to them when learning through reading story book. There might be different results or findings if the study could be done in other school. The study is done to only single race not to multi racial or multicultural pupils. Therefore, the results which base on the background of the pupils might limit the finding or results. In the unique multi racial country the way pupils performs in learning language depend on their background or in other words how they use the language in their daily life. The materials use by the researcher in the study might also limit the way pupils perform in the lessons. The childrens stories from a single publisher might limit the writi ng styles or the words use in the stories. There are many publishers in the market with better presentation and writing styles. The suitability of the childrens stories depends on the pupils knowledge or experiences. Some pupils are unable to build their first impression in the lessons because they are not familiar with the words use in the childrens stories such as world seasons, people, climate, fruits and others. This might limit pupils performance and ability to go to the next level of the learning complexity. The study mostly involves the teaching of reading and writing skills in the five lessons and the pupils may not be provide with sufficient repetition of exposure to the context during the study. This situation may not offer enough opportunities for the pupils to develop their language skills and grammar.

CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Mechanic of writing Ronal L Cramer (1995), the mechanic of writing specified the established conventions for words that you use in your documentation. Grammar reflects the forms of words and their relationships within the sentence. For example, if you put an apostrophe in a plural word such as in Make two words, you have made a mistakes in the mechanic of writing, not grammar. Mechanic of writing concerns with the capitalization, contraction of words, writing gerund and participle, writing numerals, writing pronouns, writing technical abbreviations, acronyms, units of measurement and punctuation use in sentence. The goal of mechanic of writing is to make writing precise and grammatically correct. It is directed to make the writing systematic and being concerned about how to be correct in spelling, punctuation, italics underlying, names of person, title of study in research paper, quotations, capitalization and personal names.

2.2 The important Factors of Mechanic of Writing Spelling in the research work should be consistent, clean and correct expert in a quotation. The spelling in the quotation must be the original whether correct or incorrect. If we have to divide any words, we should not do so at the end of the line. If the word does not fit there, we should leave the space and bring the words in the next line. Punctuation; the purpose of punctuation is to bring clarity in writing and to make it comprehensible. Punctuation clarifies sentence structure, separating some words and grouping others. It adds meaning to written words and guide for readers to understand as they move through sentences. Commas, full stops, semicolons, colons, dashes and parenthesis, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and exclamation point all serve the function of punctuation and one should take account of all these marks while writing. Italics (underlining), in research papers and manuscripts submitted for publication, words that would be italicized in print are usually underlined. In general we should underline foreign words used in an English text. The name of the book in which a person is doing research is always italicized.

Names of Persons, generally a researcher should state a persons name in a text of his or her research paper fully, accurately and exactly as it appears in the original source. For example Martin Luther King, Jr. should be used as it is not as only Martin Luther. Researcher must not use formal tittles in referring to men as women, living or dead, such as Prof. Devklota. Dr. Sangita. Instead of it, the researcher should only write Devkota, Sangita and so on. Titles of works in the Research Paper, title of the publication works in the research paper should be cited form the title page not form the cover page. For capitalizing titles, one should capitalize the first words, the last words, the words and the principal words, the last words and the principal words in both titles and sub-titles. Generally title of the works must be underlined or italicized. Title of the names of books, pamphlets, periodicals, films, radio and television programs etcetera should be underlined if hand written or italicized if printed in the research paper. Titles of the names of articles, essays, short stories, short poems, chapters of book and so on should be put with in quotation marks. The same is for the case of unpublished work, such as lectures and speeches. Quotations, only the most important words, phrases, lines and passages should be quoted in the research paper as briefly as possible. The researcher should put them with in quotation mark if they are three lines or less than three lines. If a quotation runs to make than four lines, it should be put under indent. 2.3 Punctuation and Spelling in learners writing Hossein Shokouhi and Sara Zadeh (2009), two mainstreams of writing mechanism which students encounter difficulties are punctuation and spelling. These two are mistakenly considered somewhat trivial to many students and this causes teachers to often ignore them as being insignificant. Students should realize that some of these errors are so crucial that they sometimes can hamper communication. Ferreiro and Pontecorvo 1999 cited in Hossein and Sara, the development of punctuation is a psychological and educational importance because it is a part of writing that needs to be dealt with the text construction. Messenger & Taylor (1989) citen in Hossein and Sara acknowledge that in writing, punctuation takes the place of the sound features (pitch, volume, speed) and physical gestures constantly used in speech. Steinhauer (2003), study strongly

supports the notion of a direct correspondence between punctuation and implicit prosody, which is defined as the rhythm of the writers inner voice. He discovered that commas are in fact likely to trigger subvocal prosodic phrasing. He also found that both punctuation and implicit prosody during reading may have a strong influence on how we comprehend sentences. Bar- Aba, (2003), punctuation marks have been studied within a variety of theoretical and descriptive frameworks. Broadly, they have been relegated to organizational and rhetorical roles. The organizational punctuation marks are said to signify breathing, syntax and rhythm. Included here are quotation marks and commas. The rhetorical punctuation marks, on the other hand, play a discoursiveexpressive role. They convey the writers attitude with respect to the status of the information. Among these are, for example, exclamation points and ellipsis dots. Shaughnessy (1977), a main characteristic of basic writers punctuation is the inconsistency in their use of commas and periods which are, in fact, the two most frequently used marks of punctuation. Commas are inserted at odd places which suggest no structural requirement, and both commas and periods mark off sentence terminations, or presumed terminations. A main source of error shows up as the failure to tell sentence boundaries which often leads to the incorrect joining of two or more sentences with a comma (comma splice) or with no punctuation at all (run-on). One of the hardest tasks the beginning writer of English must overcome is the acquisition of spelling. Shaughnessy (1977), over a third of the errors that students in writing courses make at the first level of instruction are spelling errors, and as the students move into more advanced vocabulary and begin to take greater risks with words, the proportion of errors may grow to almost half.. This difficulty is largely due to the ambiguous relationship between the spoken sounds of the language and the graphemes that represent them in writing. In Shaws (1965), words, the correct spelling of many words does not even approximate the sounds being represented.In an analysis of a corpus of misspellings, Katz & Frost (2001) discovered that errors are not a phonological, but rather, are nearly always errors that produce a homophone for the correct spelling. Katz & Frost (2001), the most vulnerable letters in a words orthographic representation are those whose relation to the words phonology is most ambiguous. Katz & Frost consider geminates (due to their apparent irrelevance to pronunciation) and unstressed vowels (because of their particularly ambiguous relation to the printed vowel) the most ambiguous. Shaw (1965) recounts that no words in English are more often misspelled than those which contain unstressed (or lightly stressed) vowels. Katz & Frost (2001) refer to the reduction

of unstressed vowels to schwa //, which makes them less favored for graphemic encoding. Another major feature of the system that causes spelling demons is the existence of mute graphemes (silent letters). Vachek (1973) these belong to different levels of predictability based on the clarity and consistence of the functions they perform in the orthography. As an example, the silent e which frequently occurs at the ends of words has the definite function of lengthening the vowel in the preceding syllable, as in sit versus site. In contrast, Vachek mentions instances of mute graphemes like the b in doubt and debt, which he ranks as clear foreignisms. Ryan (1973) believes that for many people the key to good spelling is distinguishing between long vowels and short vowels. The cognitive representation of a words spelling has been characterized by Katz & Frost (2001) as consisting of two kinds of information: (1) association between phonemes or phoneme clusters and letters, and (2) associations between spoken morphemes (including words) and whole printed morphemes. Koda (1999) relates the lack of accord between pronunciation and orthography directly to the nature of English orthographic representations. In their study of the developmental stages in the acquisition of spelling strategies, Varnhagen, McCallum & Burstow (1997) found that morphologically based spelling strategies occur slightly later in development than phonological and orthographic strategies. They found morphology to be the most difficult type of linguistic information for children to acquire. Misspellings do not always have roots in the orthographic system. Shaw (1965) observed that over half the errors commonly made are caused by misspelling the easy, simple words that nearly everyone can spell, due to oversights or mistakes of the eye. Letter reversals (scrambles) and graphic confusions (e.g. mistaking b for d or p for q) also belong to this category.

2.4 Teori and Approach 2.4.1 Explicit Teaching Model Explicit teaching involves directing student attention toward specific learning in a highly structured environment. It is teaching that is focused on producing specific learning outcomes. Topics and contents are broken down into small parts and taught individually. It involves explanation, demonstration and practise. Children are provided with guidance and structured frameworks. Topics are taught in a logical order and directed by the teacher.

Another important characteristic of explicit teaching involves modeling skills and behaviours and modeling thinking. This involves the teacher thinking out loud when working through problems and demonstrating processes for students. The attention of students is important and listening and observations are keys to success.

2.4.2 Implementation of Explicit Teaching in Spelling Class

Explicit teaching is useful for introducing topics and specific skills. It provides guided instruction in the basic understanding of required skills, which students can then build on through practice, collaboration, repetition, hands on activities and developmental play. Fathman & Whalley, (1990) cited in Hossein Shokouhi and Sara Zadeh (2009), in spite of the recent focus on process-oriented approaches to writing and the call for more emphasis on content rather than form both in L1 and L2, in their practice of writing classes, many teachers maintain a strong interest in correctness on the surface levels of grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, etc. Cumming, Kantor & Powers (2002) realized that expert TOEFL writing assessors consider aspects of surface form such as length, spelling, punctuation, etc. before attending to the content. It is usually assumed that as L2 knowledge increases, various language skills develop automatically. However, as Koda (1999) maintains, empirical evidence suggests otherwise; certain language skills, particularly those involved in writing, seem to require explicit instruction. Explicit instruction is a sequence of supports; setting a purpose for learning, telling students what to do, showing them how to do it and guiding their hands-on application of the new learning. Explicit instruction begins with setting the stage for learning, followed by a clear explanation of what to do (telling), followed by modeling of the process (showing), followed by multiple opportunities for practice (guiding) until independence is attained. Explicit instruction moves systematically from extensive teacher input and little student responsibility initially to total student responsibility and minimal teacher involvement at the conclusion of the learning cycle.

2.4.3 The framework for focused literacy instruction

A Framework for Explicit Instruction Focused Literacy Lessons

Maintenance of the specific literacy learning focus Introduction Elaboration Practice Review

Brief Lesson Orientation Setting up focused lessons in terms of specific aspects of literacy Overview of new learning Purposes of assessment tasks are made clear Review of relevant prior learning

Linking new to known concepts; reteaching if necessary Clarifying Demonstration and modelling Guided Instruction using Guided reading/writing, Reciprocal Teaching or Cooperative Reading Guided Student Practice
Formative assessment through monitoring of the talk is ongoing across the phases of the lesson

Independent practice Skills, knowledge & use of aspects of literacy Application of new learning

Summary, Review & Reflection of specific literacy learning (oral and /or written) Student reformulation and articulation of learning

As teachers we can only provide an active, progressive and sequential program of instruction when we are clear about what it is we want children to learn; when we provide a meaningful, child-centered and focused instructional program. When consideration is given to focus learning we need to provide students with opportunities to make sense of the learning by creating purposeful connections between lesson purposes, lesson tasks and texts, and lesson reviews or conclusions.The following framework for teaching and learning literacy (an adaptation of The model of effective teaching by Rosenshine and Stevens, (1986) supports teachers to organize their instruction in an explicit and systematic way. Applying the framework assists teachers to construct lessons in a way that the literacy learning purposes are clear, direct and progressively presented. It is important for students in that it establishes the learning task and the management and organizational routines clearly and does not allow the learning task to be loosely presented or blurred within talk about other things. It enables the students to actively connect new learning to what is known. Time allocated in each phase is determined by the specific lesson purpose for that lesson on that day.

2.5 Former Research Hossein and Sara (2009), the comparison between the punctuation marks in this section is carried out within classes of marks with similar frequencies. In the first frequency class, apostrophes appeared as the most troublesome punctuation marks for GW1 and GW2 subjects in the R-P task. Apostrophes were often ignored both for contracted auxiliaries (be and have) and for the possessive cases. Commas appeared as making the largest number of errors compared to periods and capitalization in both the R-P and the production task for all the three subject groups. The reason may be the relatively more patterned nature of capitalizations and periods. Every sentence begins with a capital letter (although there are other instances of the use of this marker, too) and nearly all sentences end in periods. Hossein and Sara (2009) added, most of the misspelled words of all three groups fell within the range of the 500 most frequent words of the English language. Included in this range were words such as one, right, always and patient. Smaller proportions of misspellings belonged to frequency ranges beyond the first 1000 most common words. This may be because students used fewer words in these frequency ranges, which is quite expectable. Among the nine different causes of misspellings studied in this research, vowel letters were the greatest source of problem constituting over 23 percent of the errors. Most of the misspellings caused by the choice of the wrong vowel were with the vowels in unstressed syllables (schwa) which is known as a major problematic area of the English spelling system, even with native speakers. Keith W Wright (2011), a key factor that has repeatedly come to the fore is the importance of vowels. A special characteristic of English words and the syllables of which they are comprised is that they must all contain at least one vowel that is a,e,i,o,u or the semi vowels y. words and syallable must have at least one vowel, and stand alone vowels are usually long. There are many words in English language where the name of a consonants is pronounced as their initial sound, for example, ge-ography, de-fend and em-brass. When these words are pronounced, only the name of the consonant that begins the word usually heard and that is where the spelling problems can begin. He added, it is important to know and to remember that when a word begin with a syllable which, when pronounced purely, seem to say the name of a consonant, such as the sound d in demand, b in because or p in Peter, the voiced consonant in the syllable must be accompanied by a vowel.

According to Casanave & Hubbard (1992), observe that surface language errors (including those of punctuation and spelling) distinguish native speakers from non-native speakers in the views of their instructors, and this persists for EFL writers at very advanced proficiency levels. Schmitt & Christianson (1998) concede that an EFL instructor spends a great deal of time correcting mistakes in the mechanics of composition, especially in punctuation and spacing as well as in spelling. They relate this basically to the lack of a habit in the students to proof-read their own texts before submitting them. Sometimes, however, this lack of attention is also evident among teachers or researchers. The importance of the mechanics of writing including those of punctuation and spelling deems so vast, especially in today's discourse studies in writing, that a real call for research in the area is necessary. To this end, the present study looks at many of these mechanisms from two task types: recognition production (R-P) and production in terms of composition. Because it seems it is in the production task that learners tend to use numerous unrelated punctuation forms. The results of the study have shown that despite time and effort exerted in writing classes, these courses do not lead to significant improvements in the students' performances on various aspects of punctuation and spelling. Considering the limitation of time and the huge amount of material to be covered, it certainly would not be feasible to include the teaching of handwriting, spelling or punctuation in an academic writing class, at least as it is currently practiced as such. A recommended alternative is to encourage students active participation and peer-cooperation in acquiring these and similar aspects of writing through interaction with authentic texts. It would also be advisable to put more emphasis on editing and proof-reading in all courses which involve writing in the foreign language. One way that we as teachers of writing researchers have noted over teaching such courses during years is that one of the best ways is to make students sensitive to the formalities of writing.

CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 3.1 Introduction This chapter will be divided into few sections as follows, research design, population and sampling, research instruments, data collection procedures, data analysis procedure and summary. The study will investigate the factors that contribute to enhance students spelling skills through the implementation of explicit teaching on words used in childrens stories. Explicit teaching is one of the appropriate ways to overcome or minimize students hurdles in mastering spelling skills. The activities will be carried out in five different spelling lessons. The activities that the researcher design are, oral and written activities such as, shared reading, drilling on words, pre-test (Scrambled Words), make words out of the letters in the boxes, make as many words as you can out of the given letters, complete the square to form 4 words, form other words from a long word, dictation and post-test (Scrambled Words).

3.2 Research Design The research is basically a qualitative research where the objectives is to prove that explicit teaching through the use of children story book is an effective ways in enhancing students ability in mastering spelling skills. There were multiple activities will be carry out to prove the effectiveness of explicit teaching in mastering spelling skills. To prove how effective the activities are, this study will select a group of students and the samples are select at random. The samples are of five students among a class of 34 multi levels profiency of Year 5 students of Sekolah Kebangsaan Long Boh Simpang Empat Perlis. In order to gather relevant data, five lessons will be conduct. The activities are , shared reading, drilling on words, pre-test (Scrambled Words), make words out of the letters in the boxes, make as many words as you can out of the given letters, complete the square to form 4 words, form other words from a long word, dictation and post-test (Scrambled Words). The first activity, students will be ask to do pre-test, , shared reading, drilling on words, pre-test (Scrambled Words), make words out of the letters in the boxes, make as many words as you can out of the given letters, complete the square to form 4 words,

form other words from a long word, dictation and post-test (Scrambled Words). Every activity was followed with Wh questions and students were provided with a worksheet for each and every time activities done. Qualitative research data will be collect after the lessons to determine the understanding of the activities as view from the perspective of the research samples. The qualitative research instruments are in the form of a pre-test and post-test, semi-structure interview and pupils activities sheet. Semi-structured interview data from five pupils which are select at random will be collect and analyze. The processes are transcribing the interview during the interview and recording session. Thus, the notes and recorded materials are to prove the originality of the data. It is a detail recording process occurring in the natural setting that provides the basis for understanding the setting, the participants and their interaction. L.R.Gay (2003) Then, researcher will collect data from the pupils worksheet. All five samples will pass up their written work to be analyzed. Lastly, pre-test and post-test results are the final type of data collecting after five lessons. The researcher will compare both test and identify the salient issues relate to the mistakes and errors of the students test papers. The mistakes will be analyzed by the researcher to see the salient issues reflect to the learning process. The data collect are important to see the equivalent of the responses that reflect on the effectiveness of explicit teaching in enhancing spelling skills in ELT classroom.

3.2.1 Research Design Chart

Lesson Day 5 Pre-test Story 3 100 words Interview with the samples and transcription

Lesson Day 1 Story 1 20 words

Lesson Day 4 Story 4 80 words Post-test

Lesson Day 2 Story 2 40 words

Lesson Day 3 Story 3 60 words

Result, Finding and making Conclusion

3.3 Population and Sample The samples selected were the students of Sekolah Kebangsaan Long Boh Simpang Empat Perlis. The samples for this study are a class of convenience sampling which is suitable for conducting qualitative research. The targets are a multi Level Proficiency Year 5 Class enrolls of 33 students. From there 5 students will be chosen at random as research sample. The use of simple random sampling is an ideal technique in getting the salient results. Random sampling is the best way to obtain a representative sample L.R.Gay (2003).

3.4 Research Instrument The research instruments that use in this study are pre-test and post-test, a semistructured interviews protocol and pupils written work. A semi-structured interview will be conducted to five students selected randomly for the interview after the whole lesson. The evidence is in form of interviews transcription and recorded material. The question for the interview was in (Appendix 1) Another documents analysis is the pupils worksheet. Their worksheets will be collected after every lesson from the five samples. (See Appendix 2) Lastly, two tests will be given to the pupils as another instrument. It is the pre-test and post-test of the students through the whole writing lessons. Pre test will be given before any lessons began. Meanwhile, post-test will be given after the five lessons. (See Appendix 3) Researcher will work with the finding that are receive from the research participants to identify their understanding of what they are doing from their own perspective and which help them in answering the research questions. All responses and findings will be triangulated to see the equivalent of the students performance in learning spelling skills through explicit teaching style.

3.5 Pilot Study Realibility/Validity According to L.R.Gay (2003), all these types of instruments are chosen because; i. ii. iii. iv. v. Easier to answer Give freedom to respondents Economical in term of cost and time compare to experiment Stay open to new understanding and data through the study Data are directly gathered from the participants.

3.6 Data Collection Procedure The research topic Enhancing Students spelling skills through explicit teaching of words use in children stories is chose with the help and consultation of the supervisor and the drafting of the proposal is made. The revise proposal is to be submitted to the Ministry of Education Research and Policy Division for evaluation to carry out the research. Researcher needs to get permission from the school to be granted. A few steps are taken into consideration in collecting the data for this study. The researcher is given 10 hours to collect the data at the school inclusive of five writing lesson, pre-test and post-test, interview and observation as data finding documents. Pretest will be done earlier before any lesson and the post-test will be done at the end of the five lessons. Pupils will be given worksheet in every lesson and they will be collect at the end of the lesson as document analysis. Finally, a set of question will be ask by the researcher and they have students to answer in about 20 minutes after the 5 lessons in the interview. Besides that, students are ask to give their opinion and comments on the activities done and the teaching and learning process during the interview.

3.7 Data Analysis Procedures The data collection will be triangulate to determine the effectiveness of the explicit teaching approach in enhancing students spelling skills. Beginning with the data collection from the first interaction with the respondents and continue through the entire study. After the five lessons, five students which represent the whole class are interview on their experience in learning through explicit teaching. The important issues in qualitative research while dealing with data collection, categorization and data integration are not the one that stated by the researcher but which are stated by the students. From there, the information will be collect from the students and analyze accordingly and the important aspects in relation to the study will be note and highlight. Another data collected was from the students worksheets. All students worksheets will be collected. In facilitating data analysis numbers of steps are used. By narrowing the focus of the study researcher can determine which data is important and which is not. Then, data analysis will be made after reduction process. Data will be collect from data finding documents of students pre-test and posttest. After the lesson, students will be asked to give their comments during the interview session. The data analysis will be reinforced based on the participants information. Thus, the qualitative data analysis is based on induction so the researcher constructs patterns that emerge from the data and make sense of them. After all the data analysis has been done, the research is expecting in obtaining substantial information that will form the outcome of the whole study.

3.8 Summary This study used to investigate the factors that contributed to enhance students knowledge in mastering spelling skills. Explicit teaching approach is believed to be the best solution in enhancing students spelling skills in writing. The instruments are design in this chapter will help to determine how effective is explicit teaching approach in helping and improving the level of students spelling skills. This study will be carried out and all the data collect will be analyze and interpret. Lastly, this study will explain and provide with the best way of teaching spelling skills through explicit teaching. The study will then be used as guidance for English teacher in using variety of activities in teaching of spelling.

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