Journal of Educational Sciences > Volume 6, No. 2, 1994

A Communicative Approach to Spelling for Arab Students of English / Ali Essa Al-Shabbi

With its emphasis on "fluency" over "accuracy," the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach has paid insufficient attention to spelling in the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classroom. However, error-analysis studies in the Arab World reveal that spelling is the most prevalent error in the English writing of Arab students. What I do in this paper is to discuss three types of activities for the Arab EFL classroom which retain a CLT “fluency” orientation in their approach to spelling but which promote "accuracy" in spelling: (a)  reading activities. (2) inductive-reasoning activities, and (3) language-focussing activities.