In the same way that a child’s spelling ability tends to lag behind their reading ability, it seems that the understanding of how to teach spelling seems to lag behind the understanding of how to teach reading. We used to teach spelling more effectively, hand-in-glove with reading as the other side of the reading/writing coin. But, as whole language/balanced literacy/multi-cueing became the dominant methods for teaching reading, the teaching of spelling was cut adrift. Spelling became a bolt-on, and as we lost the orthographic knowledge that came with teaching reading well, we also lost the understanding of how best to teach spelling.
What is most perplexing is that this disconnect still exists in school systems that have widely adopted the teaching of phonics as the basis for early reading instruction. This is strange because a school’s spelling programme *should* build seamlessly onto its phonics programme. Phonics is not just for reading. Decoding and spelling (encoding) are inverse operations. If to read, we teach children to decode and blend through a word, then to spell we should teach children to ‘encode’, sound-by-sound from left to right. To be maximally effective, any method or activity used to teach spelling should be consistent with this understanding.
The good news is that if you are teaching phonics systematically then you likely already have all the resources and knowledge within your school to teach spelling well. Better news perhaps, is that even if you or your school is not teaching phonics as a basis for teaching reading, then teaching spelling in the way that I will describe here will still be the most effective for all pupils, and will have the added benefit of helping your struggling readers. In fact, as a specialist dyslexia tutor, I often teach reading through the teaching of spelling.
It may also be reassuring to know that the research into the teaching of spelling is remarkably consistent. It shows that, despite having a deep and relatively complex orthography, English does in fact have highly predictable spelling patterns which, researchers conclude, all children should be taught to recognise and utilise. This is not news. Hanna, Hanna, Hodges, and Rudorf’s seminal 1966 study of over 17,000 English words, found that, with a knowledge of the main phoneme-grapheme spelling patterns, 96% of words have entirely predictable spellings and only 4% (or less) are “true oddities”. They concluded that:
“A modern spelling program is possible today as a result of new research both in linguistics and in teaching-learning theories. Such a modern spelling program will (1) start from the child’s possession of a large aural-oral vocabulary; (2) teach him how to break those words into component sounds; (3) lead him to discover the correspondences between phonemes and the alphabetical letters that have come to represent these sounds in standard English spelling; (4) help him discover the influences that position, stress, and environment have in the choice of grapheme from among the several options; (5) guide him to go beyond the phonological analysis to examine the morphological elements such as compounding, affixation or word families; (6) teach him how to use all his sensorimotor equipment of it ear-voice-eye-hand to reinforce each other in fixing the standard spelling in his neural system ; and (7) help him to build a cognitive-based spelling power that should make possible a writing vocabulary “unlimited” or limited only by the size of his spoken vocabulary.”
Hanna, Hanna Hodges, and Rudorf (1966)
The aim of this piece is to provide you as a teacher/tutor/parent with a practical guide to good spelling instruction that is consistent with the research evidence and best classroom practice. For more on the research, Cristina Milos (@surreallyno) has written an excellent summary of the literature and history of the teaching of spelling: https://momentssnippetsspirals.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/spelling-dosent-matter/
Also take time to visit the spelling page on Susan Godsland’s (@SusanGodsland) incredible all-things-reading-and-spelling resource http://www.dyslexics.org.uk/spelling.htm
Alternatively, simply type ‘spelling’ into any academic research search engine.
The Dos
So, how should we be teaching spelling? As I see it, there are three main aspects to teaching/learning spelling:
- What each child should be thinking/doing when trying to spell
- How a child should spend their spelling-study time
- How the wider, overall spelling programme should be structured
Aspect 1: What each child should be thinking/doing when trying to spell
At the most basic level, when trying to spell, every child’s automatic go-to strategy should be to:
- Segment the target word into its constituent sounds/phonemes. For example, should they want to spell ‘train’ they should think /t/ /r/ /ay/ /n/.
- Say each phoneme in order as they write, selecting an appropriate spelling for each sound.
- In the case of multi-syllable words, the child should segment and spell the word syllable by syllable following the process described in step 2, again, saying the sounds as they write them down.
Many words will be very straightforward to spell, i.e. where every sound is represented by the most likely spelling of that sound. However, other words may have a mixture of phonemes that are easy to spell with one or two that are trickier. Back to ‘train’ for example, the /t/ /r/ and /n/ are easy to spell but the /ay/ could be spelt in a variety of ways, in this case with the grapheme ‘ai’. It is this part of the word that the learner should focus on, the t, r and n do not need any thought. Spelling study (time spent learning how to spell words) should thus be spent 1) noticing patterns of spelling and 2) identifying the ‘tricky’ parts of any words and thinking how to remember to spell them within the context of those patterns.
Even if you did not read the rest of this piece, and merely got every child to approach spelling in this way then, in my experience, the standard of spelling in your class would already improve significantly. This is because:
- It builds on previous knowledge
- It reflects how the English language works
- It is multi-sensory, linking visual/auditory stimulus
- It maximises knowledge by getting even partially remembered letter strings down in the right order
- It is the most efficient use of time and learning energy
However, you could supercharge the improvement offered above by further teaching children how to use their spelling/learning time effectively and helping them to develop and internalise a phonological and morphological schema of English spelling patterns. Any spelling teaching should endeavour to help lock onto and build this schema.
Aspect 2: How a child should spend their spelling–study time
Consider then how the aforementioned child should learn how to spell the word ‘train’. If the t,r and n are easy, the child simply needs to think about how to remember that the /ay/ is spelt ‘ai’. As Professor Dan Willingham points out, memory (or learning) is the ‘residue of thought’. Thinking however, is hard work, and we need to use our limited capacity to do so wisely. If most ‘bits’ of most words have easy, predictable spellings, then it makes sense to focus attention on the phoneme/spellings that we find difficult. For example, the only difficult part of the word “people” is the ‘eo’ spelling for the /ee/ sound, so it is only that part that the learner need focus on.
Ideally, this aspect of learning spelling will be informed indeed, subsumed by Aspect 3 (the wider spelling curriculum), although parents in particular will have little control over this. Therefore, I will explain what I would do if my child or a pupil came to me with a random list of words to learn:
- Teach/remind them to spell by segmenting and then spelling phonemes in order as described in Aspect 1 (this takes time to establish as habit and will be an ongoing process).
- Test them on all the words.
- Analyse each incorrect spelling with them to see where they went wrong.
- Think about how they could remember the correct phoneme spellings (ideas below).
- Test again. If any are still wrong, review step 4 and test again. Once all are correct, take a break or do something else, and test again some time later.
In my experience this usually takes far less time than the activities usually suggested by schools and is always far more effective in both the short- and long-term.
When it comes to splitting words into syllables it helps to think of syllables as ‘mouthfuls’. Words should be syllabified in the way that feels most natural when speaking, especially from the perspective of a child thinking of how to spell the word. This means that children might split words differently to each other. For example, whether ‘accommodate’ is a/cco/mmo/date or a/ccomm/o/date. Often this does not matter, although at other times you might guide them to split a word in a way that highlights a phoneme and its spelling most helpfully.
Some ideas for remembering tricky phoneme spellings are to:
- Associate the target word with another word that the child knows how to spell, and that spells the same sound with the same grapheme. This forms the basis of Aspect 3 and will be discussed more fully below but a great example is the word ‘guarantee’. Many people struggle to spell guarantee but once you realise that ‘gu’ is used as a spelling for /g/ then this word, and several others, become much easier to spell. For example, guard, guess, guest, guide, guilty, guitar, and disguise.
- Use a spelling-voice/robot-voice. Saying a word as it looks like it should be pronounced. This really helps to cement the understanding that spelling is all about sound but has the added benefit of being quite funny. Think of your SatNav as it attempts to pronounce familiar place names! Imagine “Please don’t bother my mother and my other brother!” all said with a funny voice with mother, brother and other rhyming with bother. Robot voice particularly helps with multisyllable words where the unstressed vowel is a schwa (a weak /uh/ sound) or words where entire syllables disappear (elision).
- Notice morphology the smallest units of meaning in a word such as stems, root words, compounds, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphemes are often spelled the same way across different words and word families even when their pronunciation changes.
- Meaning: for example when analysing the word ‘accommodate’ with pupils the two ‘tricky bits’ are probably the double cc and double mm and possibly the second o. The word ‘accommodate’ means “to make room for”, so isn’t it good that the word makes room for all those letters! It is also worth pointing out, that that ‘acc…’ is a much more common spelling than ‘ac…’.
Aspect 3: How the wider, overall spelling programme should be structured
“… help him discover the influences that position, stress, and environment have in the choice of grapheme from among the several options… guide him to go beyond the phonological analysis to examine the morphological elements such as compounding, affixation or word families”
As mentioned, a good way to try and remember which spelling to use is to associate the target word with another word that the child knows how to spell and that spells the same sound with the same grapheme. For example, to remember the /ay/ is spelt ‘ai’ in train, you might associate train with ‘rain’ or ‘Spain’ to help remember the spelling. While doing this on an ad hoc basis is useful, it is far more effective to highlight such patterns in a more structured way.
For example, the word association could be used as the basis for ‘sound spelling’ charts, which you can build with individual children and/or as a class. Take this (incomplete) chart showing different ways to spell the /ee/ phoneme.
If you developed such a chart with your pupil/class then you would have an invaluable teaching/learning reference. The words in red are key words. These should be words that the child, or most of the children, know how to spell or that are easy to learn. To avoid confusion, key words should not be homophones. The key words can then be used to aid spelling teaching, e.g. if a child wanted to know how to spell the /ee/ sound in ‘dream’ you could say “It is the same as the /ee/ in ‘eat’.” This enables you to talk about the spelling in a way that avoids letter names (which may or may not be confusing to your pupils depending on age/ability) but more importantly, gives you a better ‘hook’ onto their existing knowledge than simply supplying the letter-name spelling. Building charts like this helps everyone (teachers/parents included) to connect words that share a phoneme-spelling and to notice and visualise English spelling patterns. They are particularly good for showing how spelling patterns are affected by the position of a phoneme within a word, or how some letters can affect adjacent phoneme-spellings. For example how the ‘ai’ spelling for /ay/ is not used at the ends of words, or how an ‘a’ preceded by a ‘w’ tends to sound like /o/ (e.g. swan, wasp, wander) and so on. A sound-spelling chart makes these patterns easy to notice and talk about. As Bruck et al. suggest “positional constraints must be a fundamental component of the English spelling system, or else George Bernard Shaw’s ‘ghoti’ would be a common misspelling for ‘fish’.”
When I teach spelling, I also encourage pupils to annotate certain entries, sometimes with a written note, but most often with a drawing. Take the case of homophones for example, the /ee/ chart above includes ‘sea’ and ‘see’ which have been annotated with small drawings to clarify which word is which.
In another example, I had a pupil who said she could never remember how to spell the first /er/ sound in furniture. She could spell the word ‘burn’ however, without any difficulty so, to connect the two words in her mind, I suggested she write furniture with the ‘ur’ on fire.
If every child had their own sound charts they could annotate them in the most useful way for them.
A drawing could also be used to connect words together. Here, to connect words using ‘tch’ for /ch/, a child has imagined a witch with a patch stitched onto her dress, using a crutch, on a football pitch in the middle of a match, wearing a watch, scratching an itch!
On a school-wide level, sound-spelling charts will grow ever more sophisticated as you move up the years. There should also be systematic study of morphology including stems, root words, compounds, prefixes, and suffixes. While morphemes are often spelled the same way across different words their frequently pronunciation changes. Understanding how to use affixes etc and being able to recognise word families is essential to good spelling. To be maximally effective good spelling instruction should be planned school-wide, from school-entry to exit and even on into secondary/high school, building on the same knowledge, using the same meta-language. Often phonics training in schools is reserved for those teaching the first few years when it is needed across the school phases.
Spelling Rules
You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned spelling rules. That’s because I don’t believe there are any and I certainly don’t teach them. Think of any spelling rule you think you know , pop it onto Twitter, and within seconds someone will be posting exceptions to it. Children especially do not like being told something is a ‘rule’ when it patently is not. As I have said, spelling is about patterns, or ‘tendencies’ and that is the language we should be using.
Non-examples OR the DON’TS of teaching spelling
So far this has been a gallop through the main principles of teaching spelling well with a few examples thrown in. However, learning theory suggests that in order for you to be able to generalise this new knowledge, we should consider some non-examples.
Look Say Cover Write Check
In combination with weekly spelling tests, LSCWC is by far the most common ‘strategy’ for teaching spelling in UK schools. The trouble is that it is not particularly effective. In fact, I hesitate to call it a strategy as it does not teach a child anything about how spelling works nor does it give them a *strategy* for trying to spell. It is merely a letter-by-letter rote memorisation drill. It completely loses both the connection to the meaning of spelling and the multisensorial aspect. At best, for your most able pupils, it is very inefficient because the same amount of attention is given to every word, and every letter in every word, and at worst it is a soul-destroying waste of time.
As a typical example, a child I know almost invariably scored 100% on his weekly spelling tests (diligently prepared for using LSCWC) yet his spelling when writing was consistently terrible, and when eventually tested by an Educational Psychologist was found to be only on the 22nd centile. As a result of all his efforts he could pass a short-term spelling test but had no strategy for spelling outside of that narrow context and certainly did not have the capacity to remember how to spell every word letter-by-letter. Using the method I outlined in Part 1 would have taken significantly less time than writing out all the words out and, I guarantee, would have achieved much better, more enduring results.
Usually, a pupil is given a LSCWC list of 5 to ten spellings. Sometimes, the words selected for each list are done so as to highlight a spelling pattern or a semantic theme or a morphological pattern, but at other times the selection is, from a spelling point of view, completely random (statutory spelling words for example). If, as an individual teacher, you have no choice but to use LSCWC but can select the spellings to be tested, then you have the opportunity to do better by selecting words to study which highlight particular spelling patterns and by embedding the lists within a wider, overarching programme. But be careful how you do this. For example, the particular selection in the example shown above, different ways to spell /ay/, should only be presented after you have done a lot of work building a sound-spelling chart for /ay/ that either includes these words or where the homework activity included sorting these words into the child’s own sound spelling chart. This groundwork is vital; we need to set children up for success, not lay traps for failure.
Even better, you could upgrade your LSCWC charts for these lookalike, but actually fundamentally different, sound/syllable-based charts from Phonic Books:
Other spelling activities
While the use of LSCWC is widespread, there is a plethora of other “spelling activities” to be found in schools across the English-speaking world. What you will hopefully notice is that most of these activities are simply random ways that someone has thought might make spelling as a rote-learning activity more fun or engaging. The point being however, as I have pointed out, spelling ought not to be taught as a rote-learning activity.
The images of suggested spelling activities that I share below, which I believe are from a popular teaching resources website, are typical examples of commonly recommended strategies for learning spelling. You might be surprised to hear that I found these particular spelling activity sheets in the books of children from an actively Read Write Inc school. It certainly is not what RWI would recommend, however, it just goes to highlight how disconnected spelling has become that a school which invests significantly in good training and development for the teaching of reading can still find itself stuck in the ‘spelling as bolt-on’ mind-set.
These activities are all inadequate, most are useless and several are frankly detrimental as spelling activities. I’ll highlight a few below:
Backwards Words
I could cry. This is literally the OPPOSITE of how to spell. And good luck to your pupils should any of them still not have the left-to-right principle firmly established.
UPPER and Lower
Letter-by-letter rote drill, even worse than LCSWC as your learners will be further confused by when to use capitals.
Curly Words, Fancy Letters, Join the Dots
The focus here will be on how the curly letters look not on their function, or even their order in the word.
Across and Down
Once you’ve figured out what to do, you will see that this isn’t at all helpful especially for vulnerable learners still establishing the left-to-right alphabetic principle.
Rainbow Words
Your precious, limited spelling-study opportunity has now become an art lesson and not one where there will be any effective learning of spelling. Once again this is a string of meaningless letters, and worse, the letters will quickly lose form and function in the art. The irony is that if spelling was taught more effectively in the first place there would be much more time in the school day for an actual art lesson.
Spelling Flowers, Headlines
Art/craft first, inadequate spelling activity second.
Blue Vowels
At first glance, this might look useful as vowels are often the hardest part of a word. But again the focus is on individual letters (rather than the sounds). Multi-letter graphemes are the most difficult aspect of reading/spelling and pupils should always be directed to look for 2+ letters representing units of sounds.
Pyramid Writing
An even more tedious, time-consuming, and useless letter-string activity than LCSWC.
Tell a Story, Silly Sentences
If the stories or sentences combine words that share the same phoneme-spellings then this could be useful. But this isn’t what is asked for here and such activities, the research says, where words are written in isolation from a phonological/morphological pattern, are ineffective as spelling learning activities.
Drawing an Image
In a programme ironically called No-Nonsense Spelling (it suggests rainbow writing, pyramids/diamond writing, word shapes!) you will also find the following suggestion:
As I have said, I encourage using drawing a lot. This example is fabulous for remembering the meaning of monarchy, however, as a *spelling activity* it misses the mark.
Instead, consider this:
As well as removing the initial capital letter, I have split the word into syllables and focussed on what might be the hardest part, the ‘ch’ spelling for /k/. There, I have drawn a Christmas hat to connect the ‘ch’ in monarchy with the ‘ch’ in Christmas (often a key word for that sound-spelling and most children are familiar with that word).
Mnemonics
I’m not a fan, although I know many people are. At best, mnemonics can only help in a very limited number of words and even then they are a highly inefficient method. A few of them are quite funny or ‘cute’ which is why they are so popular, although by ‘a few’, I really only mean one; Big Elephants Cause Accidents Under Small Elephants (there are variations). Personally, I teach ‘because’ by highlighting the meaning. Most pupils find ‘cause’ easy to remember and ‘be’ / ‘cause’ similarly so. They are also delighted to have this pointed out, as if they have been told some great secret.
Word Shapes
Finally, we have Word Shapes, a special kind of spelling-activity hell that, ironically, is often only reserved for children who are thought to be dyslexic. Below is an example from a well-known “dyslexia programme” very popular in schools (due in large part to it being free).
Here, just to highlight the sheer nonsense this is, I have made a word shape activity using an online word shape generator. I promise that all the words are different yet their shapes are exactly the same:
I hope that by now that it is clear to you why word shapes, or “word coffins” as prominent literacy expert Lyn Stone (@lifelonglit) calls them, are a thoroughly terrible waste of a child’s opportunity to learn, but if you’d like to know more about them, I’ll direct you to an essay written by a reading scientist who, on joining Microsoft’s ClearType team, was bemused to find that his new colleagues thought word shapes (Bouma shapes) were crucial to reading. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-recognition
Spelling and Dyslexia
The last word goes to the teaching of spelling to children who are thought to be dyslexic. As alluded to above, they are unfortunately often subject to the most useless, vacuous, and misleading activities of all. I have even been told by some “dyslexia experts” that they do not bother teaching spelling at all as they consider dyslexics as uneducable in this regard. So why do I, as a specialist dyslexia tutor, frequently teach reading through the teaching of spelling? Simply because it is enormously effective. And the research backs this up unequivocally. I will quote a few examples here, but a simple search will uncover many more:
“The research we have discussed also has implications for instruction for children with dyslexia. As outlined earlier, much of the recent research suggests that what we have learned about spelling development in typical children holds also for children with dyslexia. Dyslexics certainly learn about the writing system more slowly than other children. However, they appear to face the same stumbling blocks and make the same kinds of errors. Instruction needs to be targeted at the same linguistic features for all children, but it needs to be more intensive and more explicit for struggling spellers.”
Bourassa, Treiman (2009)
“This systematic review and meta-analysis investigated the efficacy of spelling interventions for the remediation of dyslexia and spelling deficits. Theoretically important moderators, such as the treatment approach as well as orthographic and sample characteristics, were also considered. Thirty-four controlled trials that evaluated spelling interventions in children, adolescents, and adults with dyslexia and spelling deficits were included. Results show that treatment approaches using phonics, orthographic (graphotactic or orthographic phonological spelling rules), and morphological instruction had a moderate to high impact on spelling performance. A significant influence of interventions that teach memorization strategies to improve spelling could not be confirmed. This work shows that understanding the principles of an orthography is beneficial for learners with dyslexia or spelling deficits and presents key components for effective spelling intervention.”
Galuschka, Görgen, Kalmar, Haberstroh, Schmalz, Schulte-Körne, (2020)
“Skilled reading involves rapid and automatic word recognition. Through a self-teaching process, phonological decoding during reading is thought to establish the word-specific representations in memory that support efficient word reading. Much is known about orthographic learning during reading; less is understood about this process during spelling. Here, we compared the degree of orthographic learning that occurs during reading and spelling. Forty-eight children in Grade 2 practised reading or spelling nonwords within stories. Orthographic learning was measured using spelling recognition, spelling production and word naming tasks. Both readers and spellers showed evidence of orthographic learning; however, spellers outperformed readers on all tasks. Overall, results suggest that spelling sets up a higher quality representation in memory and highlight the importance of spelling in the development of word reading efficiency.”
Conrad, Kennedy, Saoud, Scallion, Hanusiak (2019)