8 Ways To Teach spelling, punctuation and grammar

For many English teachers, teaching Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG) is daunting. The stakes have always been high: if your pupils are not good spellers, struggle to punctuate correctly and have a tendency to use non-standard forms in their writing, then invariably they won’t achieve highly, particularly in exams.
Since the beginning of this decade, the stakes ramped up another notch with Conservative Education Secretaries and ministers imposing SPaG tests on primary schools and insisting on more weighting on SPAG in GCSE and A-Level English/English Literature exams. This has raised anxieties considerably. This article aims to provide some tried and tested ways to diffuse some of these worries, drawing together the best research and practice.