ABSTRACT
Bilaran National High School students faced a serious problem with regard to spelling and vocabulary. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of SAVE Project in enhancing the students’ spelling and vocabulary skills. The experimental method of research was used by the researcher in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the said project. The participants of the study were two sections of Grade 9 namely: Pythagoras and Herodotus. Grade 9 Pythagoras was chosen as the experimental group and Grade 9 Herodotus was the control group. Pre-Test and Post-Test were administered. The pre-test results of the control and experimental group showed that there was no significant difference since the t-value of 0.15 is lower than the critical value of 2.00 set at 0.05 level of significance. However, after the experimentation, the result showed that there is a significant difference on their post-test results as revealed by the t-value of 3.78 which is higher than the critical value of 2.00 set at 0.05 level of significance. Therefore, the researcher highly recommends the implementation of the SAVE Project to enhance students’ spelling and vocabulary skills.
Keywords: SAVE Project, Spelling, Vocabulary
INTRODUCTION
Many learners and even sometime adults have problems with spelling and vocabulary. Even high school and college learners commit mistakes in spelling and vocabulary.
Terry (2023), explained that poor spelling abilities can lead to a lack of confidence and poor performance at school. Spelling and reading are interconnected, so one step in improving reading skills is to improve learners’ spelling skills. This is the reason why teachers include spelling instruction in our reading and spelling program. People who have poor spelling abilities or spelling difficulties sometimes avoid using words that are out of their spelling abilities for fear of making spelling mistakes. They can also be reluctant to share their work or participate in activities like writing on a whiteboard in front of a group or typing comments in a virtual learning environment.
Sobrepeňa (2023), cited that one of the skills being developed in the language arts program in the elementary and secondary schools is writing, which includes spelling. A student’s facility in the use of a language is determined not only by his ability to express himself orally but also by his skill in communicating his ideas in writing. This skill demands the ability to spell words in such a way that they convey the intended meaning to the reader rapidly and accurately. Unless the student masters this skill he would be depriving himself of one of the fundamental tools of human communication.
Filipino learners are not exempted in this kind of problem. National high school teachers in English express their disappointments as well in students’ spelling and vocabulary skills.
DepEd Memorandum No. 173, s. 2019 mentioned that there are still many learners struggling to meet the learning standards in early language, literacy and numeracy. It also confirmed that elementary and high school learners are still deficient in literacy skills both in languages and content areas.
Bilaran National High School- English Department discovered that their learners are experiencing difficulties in spelling. To confirm its accuracy, SAVE Project was introduced. SAVE Project stands for Spelling and Vocabulary Enhancement Project. Upon the initial assessment on the four Grade 9 sections, the data revealed that the mastery level of students in spelling is 58.16% only. This is why the researcher decided to implement the SAVE Project for four (4) months to evaluate the effectiveness of this project in enhancing the learners spelling and vocabulary skills.
RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES
Da Costa and Arias (2021) revealed on their study that spelling deficiency has the higher percentage of errors, indicating the greatest deficiencies. In this sense, it is observed that spelling difficulties or spelling errors according to teachers' opinions, ordered from highest to lowest are: 60% omission, followed by difficulties related to substitution and transposition of letters (both with 20%). Therefore, it can be shown that students have greater difficulties with letter substitution.
Altamimi and Rashid (2019) proved that there are different causes of students’ spelling errors such as the education system and university syllabus, students’ learning attitude, and the interference between English and Arabic language. This paper concludes that the spelling errors which Saudi university students commit were caused by the negative impacts of their education system and syllabus, where the syllabus ignores the importance of spelling rules and techniques, and the interference between English and Arabic language when the learners refer to their mother tongue while writing in the English language.
Rosen (2023) stated that many kids and adults have trouble with spelling. And they may struggle for different reasons. That’s because spelling is a complex activity that involves many skills. Spellers have to think about how words sound and then translate those sounds into print. They have to memorize lots of spelling rules — and remember the exceptions to those rules. They also have to choose between different words that sound the same: Sent, cent, or scent? There, they’re, or their?
Nurhayati (2023) conducted a study about the low spelling ability of Kindergarten students in Al-Irsyad Madiun that is caused by (1) the uninteresting activities in learning English; (2) the students' difficulties in spelling English words; (3) the students' low motivation in learning. The results proved that by conducting games, using interesting media, and creating various interesting tasks and activities can increase the students' motivation in learning English spelling ability.
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