English and Children with Special Educational Needs in Key Stages 1 and 2

Spelling difficulties: assessment and teaching

As spellers, children fall into three main categories:

• Children who become competent readers and speller. These children are able to integrate many different kinds of knowledge in their spelling as they do in their reading, and use sound, visual, meaning, and structural knowledge to spell words. They make links between their reading and spelling.
• Children who are good readers but poor spellers. These children draw on more limited visual information in reading; rely more heavily on phonological (early) strategies in spelling; don’t make links between strategies for reading and those for spelling.
• Children who are poor readers and poor spellers. These childrenhave limited information to draw on from reading; they have few effective strategies in spelling – either phonological or visual.
  

In all cases however, children exhibit different strengths and weakness and must therefore be considered as individuals. Children who experience difficulties need targeted support, often over several years of the primary school (O’Sullivan and Thomas, 2007).

Examples 1 and 2: writers and spellers at the very early stages

The girl in example 1 writes a string of letters which bear little relationship to the spelling system, although she is able to form some letters. Children at an earlier level of writing may simply make marks on paper. The girl in example 2 uses copying as a strategy or routinely writes the same narrow range of words, where possible.

Support for inexperienced writers and spellers, of whatever age, might include:

• Scribing for the child – to demonstrate how writing goes
• Writing underneath a 'string of letters' – to offer a standard model
• The teacher/adult scribing to complete a piece of writing which the child has started, in order to offer encouragement
• Helping child to 'have a go' at writing words - using initial sound/letter, using what they can hear/remember
• Having an agreed approach eg writing what they can remember of the word beginning and a line
• Encouraging children to use classroom resources such as word banks, early dictionaries to help their spelling

Example 3: a child who is a poor reader and poor speller

Children who are not successful readers have few resources to draw on in their spelling. D in Example 3 above was helped as far as possible to see himself as a writer, and to take a full part in the curriculum of the class, despite his difficulties. Support for a child like D would include

• broadening the range of their strategies – to look at words as well as ‘sounding them out’
• listing word the child can successfully spell
• practising commonly occurring words, letter patterns, and word structures arising in his writing eg D spells ‘can’ as ‘cun’  and ‘lips’ as ‘leeps’. These can be worked on and used to build other words which work in the same way
• practising with a spelling partner
• working on at least a section of a piece with a teacher or TA, when writing longer pieces, carefully looking at misspellings and articulating ways of remembering them
• simple dictations to practise frequently occurring words and for monitoring progress. These can be based on extracts from books read or extracts from child’s own writing that have been discussed and worked on
• a personal spelling book of words the child can spell, including those with similar patterns, or on index cards

Example 4: a child who is a fluent reader but poor speller

Children in this category often draw only on partial information as they read and may tend to make predominantly phonetic errors. This group of children tend to see the spelling system as arbitrary and sometimes spell the same word in different ways or represent the same feature in different ways. Children should be encouraged to see themselves as writers and thinkers and to expand their writing repertoire in spite of their difficulties with spelling. Because children are competent or even highly fluent readers, it is easier for their needs as spellers to be overlooked. If by the age of 7 or 8 the discrepancy between reading and spelling becomes increasingly marked, then it is necessary to provide some direct teaching and support.

In Example 4, J’s choice of spelling patterns is often phonetic. He often chooses the wrong letter pattern eg ‘tites’ for ‘tights’ and ‘bekes’ for ‘beaks’. He therefore needs to work on the main ways familiar patterns are represented. He also needs to be helped to pay attention to: common word endings such as ‘ion’ in ‘religen’ and ‘ern’ and ‘orn’ as in ‘patterns’ and ‘stubborn’ and to word roots, recognising, for example, that jewellery, which he spells ‘julry’ has its root in ‘jewel’.
Children should be encouraged to:

• actively edit and self-correct their writing, including working with a spelling partner.
• make connections at many different levels in order to develop their spelling knowledge eg making analogies between words with similar rimes, visual patterns, word structures (and meanings).
• work with a spelling partner
• use approaches such as Look-Say-Cover-Write-Check with a particular focus on word features they need to work on (eg a particular root word, pattern or structural aspect).

(O’Sullivan and Thomas, 2007)

Spelling Assessment

Below is a Spelling Assessment Framework which can be used to analyse the spelling of children who are causing concern. The framework should be used with a piece of a child’s unaided writing. Words should be entered one at a time, under the appropriate column:

• words spelled in standard form
• structure and meaning errors/visual errors
• phonetic spellings
• early phonetic/early visual representations
• pre-linguistic, showing  little understanding of the spelling system.

Analysis will show where the bulk of the child’s errors lie, and where to focus teaching.  The framework provides a detailed record of progress over time, as the bulk of a child’s errors progress from right to left, across the grid.

(O’Sullivan and Thomas, 2007)

Further reading:

1. O’Sullivan, O. and Thomas, A. (2007) Understanding Spelling, Routledge