Learning Strategy Elicitation in NLP

Let me give you the full story here. In a spelling strategy the steps of course are to discover, to utilise, to change and design and to install. We’d find out what steps someone’s using, we’d use the strategy to assist the student in learning. We’d automate a new sequence so it becomes part of a person’s unconscious process. Changing also includes the process of designing and streamlining which is there to make it more effective.

Or we could install a new strategy from scratch and then installing which we’d install a new strategy if necessary. So a spelling strategy elicitation, you want to start at the beginning and you say, “When I give you a word, what’s the first thing you do on the inside?” then you can back track and go on, so first you blah blah blah then you do what?

Then you make sure you get the steps that have to do with how to spell the word. Some bad spellers by the way do not have a really good spelling strategy so you want to watch their eye patterns and notice what they do. Then you say, “When you see, hear or feel that, how do you know that it’s right?” You get only as much detail as you need.

So remember first of all that bad spellers are made, they're not born and bad spellers are not learning disabled, they were teacher disabled. So here are some inappropriate spelling strategies. Some begin with a negative kinaesthetic, they begin with a bad feeling. Some people sound out the strategy phonetically and by the way you can't even read phonetics phonetically, think about that for a moment if you know phonetics. Sound it out, that only gives you 50% accuracy. If you use visual construct that’s real creative spelling but it really isn't the way to do it.

The best way to do it of course is with visual recall. Now an excellent spelling strategy will, if they're asked to spell the word they may repeat the word internally, they see the word in visual remembered or they may defocus rapidly. The way you can tell if a person is visualising the word is you have to ask them to spell it backwards and they’ll be able to do that rapidly. Ask the child to spell the word backwards so you can tell whether or not they're visualising it. That’s going to be real important for you if you're working with a spelling strategy. Do they have a feeling of familiarity or not and you want to look for a shift in breathing or gestures. I think how good a speller they are may depend on what they read.

Now if a client doesn’t get any feeling of familiarity you could have them do a visual construct until they get the feeling of familiarity and I think you need a secondary strategy for words for which no memory image exists and then have the final kinaesthetic be a motivator for continual improvement. Let’s talk about how to install a spelling strategy. I think you want to ask the student, “Do you have any objections to being a good speller, would it be okay for you to be a good speller?” And then you want to put the new strategy only in the context of spelling. The new strategy will not result in instantly being an expert speller but should result in rapid improvement.

Here are some common problems with spelling strategies. People try to create the word while looking in visual remembered, so you can say, “Look up here and wait until you see the word the way you have seen it before. Allow the image to pop up.” If people draw a blank, if you have a person drawing a blank, one of the kids draws a blank, then write out the word and hold it up in their visual remembered Upper Left. So they can see it there. Have them look at it and then close their eyes and see it internally as a memory image. Hold up the word for a short period of time. If you hold it up too long some people will try to describe it rather than see it in their memory. Than have them visualise the word on something they can remember easily. Then a person may keep going back to their old strategy rather than using the new one so reframe the persistent voice.

Okay so that’s spelling strategies. Let me talk for a moment about what my intervention with what I do generally with kids when I’m working with them and this is a complete intervention for both dyslexia and also this is also a complete intervention for attention deficit hyper activity disorder and this is what I’ll typically do when I’m working with a child.