Hello!

Happy to be your Literacy Support I/C as this means that I get to spotlight common mistakes made by students – regardless of race, language, or religion – and hopefully reduce the incidence of these errors.

“Same Same But Different” refers to homonyms. But I thought it would be effective to use a phrase students are already culturally familiar with.

The first pair I’d like to address is “went” and “when”.

Here are some points I’d like to raise awareness of:

• “Went” and “when” are sight words. Students have to memorise how to read them. Your weakest students will be stumped by them.
• Since “went” and “when” sound the same, students often mistakenly spell one word when the other word in the pair is the correct choice for the context.
• Another common error is misspelling “went” as “want” and “when” as “whent”.

Yes, you guessed it right! The next pair of homonyms I’d like to go through is “want” and “one”.

Cheers,

Kai Le Sensei