Literacy at Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1

c. Learning to spell

According to the Writing Developmental Continuum (Raison, 1997) there are 3 phases before the conventional writing phase.

• Children engage in role play writing, in which they become aware of written symbols and experiment with marks on the page
• Children learn that speech can be written down and that there is a constant in the written word
• Children begin to have a sense of audience and sentence.

In the very early years of learning to write, children do not make a distinction between writing and drawing, painting and modelling, as means of recording and exploring their experience. The work of Bearne (2003) has usefully explored such multimodal approaches and the UKLA document More than Words: Multimodal texts in the classroom (QCA/UKLA, 2004) illustrates how teachers can encourage children to use multiple ways of recording alongside their writing in the early years.

Emergent or developmental writing refers to the developmental approach to the teaching of writing in the Early Years that relies on children making independent attempts at writing, using any knowledge or experience they have of print. The focus is on the child’s intentions and composition, and their developing theory of how the writing system works, rather than on early mastery of conventional transcriptional skills. However, their knowledge of phonics both supports their attempts to spell words for themselves, and is reinforced by the process of developmental writing.

So we need to look at the process of how, through experimenting and playing with a range of materials, young children begin to gain control over writing. We need to train our student teachers to observe what children’s progress looks like in this area. A useful way of developing awareness is to ask groups of student teachers to put samples taken at different times of developmental writing by the same child into a chronological order, based on the ways in which words are represented.

It is crucial for student teachers to understand that children should acquire confidence in their ability to ‘write’ independently and should develop a positive attitude to writing (Clay, 1975). Our student teachers also need to learn to support children’s attempts at spelling by helping them to segment the words they wish to write into their component phonemes, and familiarising them with the letters that most straightforwardly represent these. Laminated ‘alphabet charts’ can be a useful reminder for young children of the letters they can use to represent the phonemes they hear.

However, the complexities of English spelling mean that children also need to learn the visual patterns in words. Some of these will be rime patterns, and some morphological patterns, such as the ‘ed’ used to represent the very different sounding past tense markers at the ends of the words ‘called’, ‘jumped’ and ‘landed’.

In the very early stages of learning to write, it is helpful to have some key words on the classroom wall for easy reference, as well as the names of everyone in the class. Once children can use developmental spelling to communicate their meanings relatively clearly, and successfully, they need to learn to look at words carefully. We need to train our student teachers to group words in terms of their spelling patterns, and to draw children’s attention to these. These issues are further examined in Understanding Spelling by Olivia O’Sullivan and Anne Thomas (2000), a book based on careful research, but aimed at student teachers and the newly qualified.