Spelling difficulties
For teachers to effectively to support individual children, including those with particular difficulties, they need an understanding of how children learn to spell and how to support their learning. This is particularly true for children who are experiencing problems.
Learning to spell
Adult spellers draw on a variety of sources of information and use a range of strategies. An effective way to demonstrate this is to ask students to take part in a short spelling test.
Activity
The following activity aims to demonstrate that spelling is not just a question of ‘getting it right or wrong’, but is about using a range of effective strategies and their spelling knowledge to spell unfamiliar words or words they are unsure of.
Spelling test
The website below provides a range of commonly misspelled words. Choose a list of around 10 words and ask students to spell them. As well as the experience of trying to spell the words, the emphasis should be on thinking about what kinds of knowledge they are drawing on and strategies they are using.
Words such as: supersede, desiccate, pursue, liquefy, seize, judgement, dissipate, accommodate, repetition, sacrilegious
Visit http://www.sentex.net/~mmcadams/spelling.html for more examples, but take care to check the spellings first.
After the test – compare answers but then compare a list of sources of knowledge and strategies they used. These will usually include:
‘I sounded it out’
‘I wrote out the word and looked at it – to see if it looked right’
‘I used the word root’
‘I applied the rule’
As children learn to spell they draw on many different kinds of knowledge from early on:
- what they can hear
- what they can remember visually
- whole words known ‘by heart’
- structural (grammatical) and semantic (meaning) aspects of spelling eg ‘ed’ endings, and word roots such as medicine, medical, medication. These aspects of spelling become increasingly important as children move into Key Stage 2
- they make analogies between a known word and a new word they were trying to spell
(Treiman, 1994; O’Sullivan & Thomas, 2007)
Children may take different routes into spelling: they frequently prefer a phonological route, identifying the main sounds that they can hear eg:
- I cudut sleep this arrpan and lorrs wok me aup
I couldn’t sleep, this aeroplane and lorries woke me up
J., age 5, Reception
However, some children may take a visual route, eg:
- Dear Jack I am sory that I bolli you. Can you com to my tea pete. I will be your bes fies. Love from the giant.
Dear Jack I am sorry that I bullied you. Can you come to my tea party. I will be your best friend.
S., age 5, Reception
S. has a good memory for familiar words and her attempts at spelling often include ‘visual’ patterns eg ‘ll’ in ‘bolli’ (bullied) and ‘ie’ in ‘fies’ (friend) which can be seen but not heard.
To develop successfully, ‘phonetic’ spellers need to acquire the visual and structural aspects of the English spelling system, ‘visual’ spellers need to be able to drawn on the phonetic aspects of the system.
Spelling strategies
It is important that teachers introduce children to a variety of ways of learning new words and do not restrict children to ‘sounding words out’.
Teachers should encourage children to:
- use a mixture of what they can hear, their knowledge of probable letter patterns and word meanings
- make analogies from words they already know
- syllabify words where appropriate
- focus on word roots or families
- draw on rules or generalisations
- sometimes use mnemonics or other memory aids to learn problematic spellings eg ‘separate’ has ‘a rat’ in it
- list the alternative ways in which a word might be spelled, look at them, then make decisions about which version is correct.
It is important that children who experience spelling difficulties are introduced to a range of strategies and have extensive opportunities to work on these aspects of spelling, linked to their stage of development and words identified from their writing.
References
- O’Sullivan, O. and Thomas, A. (2007) Understanding Spelling, Routledge
For short description of this project see http://www.clpe.co.uk/researchandprojects/researchandprojects.html
- Treiman, R. (1994) ‘Sources of information used by beginning spellers’ in Gordon, D., Brown, A. and Ellis, N.C. (eds) Handbook of Spelling Theory, Process and Intervention, John Wiley and Son
 
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