Personal Dictionary: A Digital Artifact

Describing the Data: My digital artifact is a piece of student work, a student’s personal dictionary to be exact started on an Excel spreadsheet.

My students were asked to create personal dictionaries in their ESL class. We started out by including words from their everyday use that they spell incorrectly. They then included about 30 words that I gave them which included words that were commonly spelled incorrectly. After that we placed in words that we might want to spell correctly associated with our theme of study. Currently we are studying the play “Fiddler on the Roof” for an upcoming ESL field trip. Therefore, most students not knowing the word fiddler included that word into their dictionary.

Making sense of the data: I really wanted to look at students' spelling/communication skills as the way it is being taught in my school right now is not working for my students. It has always bothered me that I always feel a little helpless in helping them with this. I wanted to search for a solution for at least some of my students who do not progress with traditional approaches to the teaching of spelling. I thought that using a personal dictionary might be a good solution. Yet, I have recently questioned starting the personal dictionaries on Excel, as I feel that this may not be the best use of technology. Why did I choose Excel? Excel does not have an automatic spell check feature, and therefore as some of the students are including words and spelling them incorrectly without the spell check warning I fear that they will learn how to spell them incorrectly. My partner, in class, has also noticed that in the data the student spelled parallel, paraalel. I have selected this piece because it is from a lower leveled ESL student, and these are the students that I am attempting to target the most in improving their communication skills.

Interpretation and Implication: I am starting to wonder if using a notebook type personal dictionary might be just as useful for some of my students. Notebook type personal dictionaries are portable, and very tangible. Whereas, the Excel spreadsheet is lacking in these areas it definitely makes up for in other ways. The reason I wanted my students to start out using Excel is because they are older. I wanted them to have a document saved to their district files that they could use not only throughout middle school but into high school too, if they so chose. Some of them are not going to find this useful beyond our use, and I recognize this. These are my students who are already somewhat apt readers and spellers. One student in particular that I am thinking of, is having a difficult time finding words to add into her personal dictionary. There is another challenge with her…How do I make this meaningful for her? It has still become useful, as her being an ESL student, we are including newer vocabulary words that she comes across for her. I think that personal dictionaries are useful tools, but at the middle school level, how do I get the students to buy into this idea when some of them clearly associate it with a younger age level?

Good Spellers Need Only Apply

As a Student Services teacher I have seen many students with learning disabilities struggle with their written communication because, they have not mastered many of the early sight words, and they tend to not do very well with in-class traditional approaches to the teaching of spelling. I have often wondered if these traditional approaches even work with kids who do not have learning disabilities as I do not feel that the transfer of the spelling skill tends to happen. I do agree with Scheuermann, in her article titled "The Personal Spelling Dictionary: An Adaptive Approach to Reducing the Spelling Hurdle in Written Language"that spelling to some extent is an important skill to master. Whether a student types an email or hand writes a job application in the future, there is an element of judgment that is passed upon poor spelling skills; usually the association is made to one’s level of education and overall intelligence. I feel that it is unfortunate that teachers start to use spelling as a criterion in their evaluation of written student work as early as grade four. Proper spelling needs to be encouraged, especially as it impedes overall communication, however, student work should be mainly be assessed for information, and ideas.
Many teachers, for fear of the dreaded weekly rote spelling lists, have adopted the philosophy that students will learn the rules of spelling when they are developmentally ready and do not formally teach spelling. However, this philosophy has proven to be detrimental to many students as it simply does not work. Many students then come into middle school with a lack of basic sight word knowledge, and once invented spelling has been ingrained for such a long period of time it is difficult to replace with proper spelling skills. Spelling still needs to be taught. However, it needs to be taught in such a way that is engaging for the student, it is seen as a real life application of a skill, and it is a personal process for the student. I agree with Scheuermann that the personal dictionary is able to fulfill on these criteria. However, Scheuermann advises teachers to laminate the pages of the dictionary and use medical tape and other methods to create the words so that they can easily be removed. I do not think that the personal dictionary has to be as involved. It could simply be a note book with penciled in words. Then when the student wishes to remove a mastered word they can erase it. Or better yet, if I were doing this with notebooks with my students I would have them place a sticker next to a mastered word to show off their accomplishments. I may have my students do this on the Excel document that they are using. However, I don’t think they have been using it for a long enough time period yet. Scheuermann does not have much faith in electronic spellcheckers. I was starting to feel that my Excel personal dictionary was little more than an electronic spellchecker as I was reading this article. In that it had some of the same pitfalls: not easily portable, not accessible at home etc. However, as I further reflected on this concept I believe that there are significant differences. If a student creates an Excel personal dictionary and saves it to a flash-stick it becomes very portable and useable for the student. It is always then with them, and they do not necessarily have to look up each word every time. Also, as Scheuermann says, we can include punctuation/capitalization rules into the Excel document. My goal is to have them improve upon their spelling skills, and I think that we are that one step closer.