Sorry for the delayed response! Had some problems logging in! 'Spelling Improvement'- A Program for Self Instruction by Patricia M Fergus can be a good help at hand for teaching spelling to university students. The book deals with different areas where attention to spelling is necessary and also areas where we are prone to make mistakes. University students (anybody, for that matter!) hate writing assignments, of course! But periodical assignments on focused areas in spelling on the topics that are of interest to students can really work to your favor. Further, a bit of action research as to how you can group your students based on the similarities of spelling errors they commit can come to your rescue in addressing their spelling issues. I know "it's much easier said than done", but I am sure this will help! All the best!!!

Some practical ways:

1. Get them to read lots of interesting stuff.

2. Get them to take note of the shape of the words: "unversity" (sic) has a different shape to "university". And it is a bit too short. Draw a line right around words in headlines to emphasize their shapes.

3. Teach them how to use spelling checkers, and their limitations.

4. Teach them pointedly the problems of hononyms such as "their" and "there".

5. Give them lists of American-British differences.

6. Give them lists of commonly misspelled words, and get them to draw up their own lists of problem words.

For research on the topic, give "teaching spelling to university" to scholar.google.com.

I endorse everything Ian Kennedy recommends. I get annoyed (well, in a resigned sort of way) with my students when they send me texts with mistakes (non-English students writing in English) - for two reasons:

1. They are writing in a foreign language so they should be more concerned about quality control of their text than perhaps a native speaker might be.

2. Because they are writing in a foreign language they should AUTOMATICALLY be thinking to use a word-processing spell-checker. However, these don't work unless they set the language in the Tools menu to either English US or English UK.

I would add a point 7 to Ian's list:

7. Emphasise the importance of quality control in everything they do - go back and check if all their text looks OK to them (Ian's points 1 to 6), and they should never send any text to someone else before doing quality control first. Yes, it takes more time and slows them down but it reflects on them to other people.

An additional one, which encourages all students to look at how they are communicating is:

8. Assign a mark to the quality of communication.

I think you also have to be realistic and think about what you are trying to achieve in terms of their learning. Spelling and grammar are important, but you might want to weight your marks differently for an English Literature or Law assessment, compared to one in Fluid Mechanics.

Entry requirements can help (in theory at least). If the quality of written English (or any other language of assessment) needs to be high, include a higher IELTS or TOEFL (or equivalent) score in the standard requirements.

It is probably worth making a distinction between a student not knowing how to spell words, and not bothering to check if words have been spelt correctly. Ian's suggestions focus mainly on the former, and mine focus on the latter. Both are important. In my case, I work with PhD students who are learning to become researchers. For them , the concept of quality control has to become part of their psyche, and that applies just as much to spelling the words they write as it does to designing their experiments. It's like the tailor measuring cloth - measure twice and cut once! Checking the quality of what you are doing should be disseminated throughout the education system, so students should check their spelling twice and submit once.

Steve

One interesting thing is to keep students' interests in mind. Teaching them things according to a teacher's interest is not very good. Another suggestion is to keep in mind if students are visual, auditory or if they have some kind of autistic, ADHD, or any other type of way of doing things. I loved the ffollowing video on people who are wired differently:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuzE6lMQQmo

Sorry for the delayed response! Had some problems logging in! 'Spelling Improvement'- A Program for Self Instruction by Patricia M Fergus can be a good help at hand for teaching spelling to university students. The book deals with different areas where attention to spelling is necessary and also areas where we are prone to make mistakes. University students (anybody, for that matter!) hate writing assignments, of course! But periodical assignments on focused areas in spelling on the topics that are of interest to students can really work to your favor. Further, a bit of action research as to how you can group your students based on the similarities of spelling errors they commit can come to your rescue in addressing their spelling issues. I know "it's much easier said than done", but I am sure this will help! All the best!!!

Thanks for the question. My students do not spell well. Favorite excuse - 'English is not our first language'. It's really bad this semester; the first topic is Biodiversity. So this is what I get to read (as compared to what it should be):

Risopoda (Rhizopoda); Ciliopoda (Ciliophora); Apiplexa (Apicomplexa); Nestum (Gnetum).

These errors seem to imply a 'short circuit' has occurred while they are learning :(

But I will try some of your suggestions and cures, thanks.

@Miranda: I think that your students may be short-circuiting their spelling because of the 'unusual' letter combinations: zo, ph, ic, gn, and laziness in listening and pronunciation. Perhaps you can emphasise the roots of the words, and get the class to echo your exaggerated pronunciation.

Thanks Ian, I will do that. My students have many disadvantages and they are also lazy, it's true. When I was at school, my friends and I would understand terms like 'hermaphrodite' straight away, and we also know the origin of those words; but now this generation of students just stare in perplexity, when they come across these terms. Any ideas, anyone, how can they overcome this?

@Miranda: Teach Latin and Greek again?

I used to give students half-marks if they misspelled an answer. Then I changed to E-learning, and gave them zero -- I am not going to program many misspellings as being "half right". I tell them that today Google does not recognise nonsense like "Apiplexa", and they quickly realize that spelling is important, even today.