The Future of Education

Improving schoolteachers’ initial training is the basic objective of the Programme for Improving and Innovating Schoolteacher training promoted by The Interuniversity Council of Catalonia. Among this Programme’s main objectives are the following: enhancement of leadership skills in future schoolteachers, teamwork, the ability to communicate knowledge well, communication skills with students and families, the evaluation culture and that of reflective practise and research, as well as learner-centred methodologies like, for instance, project work.

The ability to communicate knowledge well includes, among other aspects, promoting correct spoken and written expression in the three languages studied in Catalan schools: Catalan, as the working language, English and Spanish.

This paper aims to show the results obtained when working on the spelling of a mother tongue using a virtual blog in a classroom of the Double Degree in School teaching. Good use of spelling was one of the initial shortcomings demonstrated by the 33 students enrolled at the beginning of the 2015-2016 academic year. Therefore, this blog was conceived as a motivational and support tool for the teacher’s explanations to these 33 students.

This study is based on an initial phase (pre-test) comprising tests approved by the international community, which have highlighted these students’ main linguistic shortcomings. Among these shortcomings, three stand out: the proper use of accent marks in the mother tongue, the correct use of textual connectors and the correct spelling of words with homophone sounds. Out of these, we worked hard on the correct usage of diacritical marks in words from the students’ mother tongue. This paper will show that, after working with the virtual blog for 4 months, results have been satisfactory, since more than 70% of the students have progressed in mastering and use of spelling in a native tongue, especially in the use of accent marks and that of homophone sounds.