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Published: 06 November 2013

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Implications for practice of current research on spelling.

Dr Kerry Hempenstall, Senior Industry Fellow, School of Education, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

First published Aug 9 2013 Updated 3/5/2018

 All my blogs can be viewed on-line or downloaded as a Word file or PDF at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/olxpifutwcgvg8j/AABU8YNr4ZxiXPXzvHrrirR8a?dl=0

Feel like a spell? Effective spelling instruction.

This early spelling document contains various studies, and some of them are now around 20 years old.

I decided to take into account more recent documents, and I’ve selected only research findings published in the years 2020 to 2025.

My idea was to get some sense of how spelling instruction may have changed in the time difference.

Something is noticeable recently regarding spelling papers. It’s clear that the reports from press and academics releasing papers are markedly busier than in past years. There is clearly a stronger attention to student spelling attainment, and greater efforts to reduce spelling problems over time.

My original document is still available at the end of this document or you can catch the address here:

https://www.nifdi.org/resources/hempenstall-blog/390-feel-like-a-spell.html

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So, some of the new spelling issues:

Implementing an Effective Multi-tiered System of Support to Teach Spelling (2024)

Target audience: School educators teaching in Foundation to Year 6 and in the early secondary school years

Presenter: Dr Tessa Daffern

Adjunct Associate Professor in the SOLAR Lab at the School of Education, La Trobe University, and Co-director at Literacy Education Solutions.

Description: “Spelling is an essential transcription skill for writing, as well as a visible word-level language skill that supports reading and vocabulary learning. It is also a complex word-formation process. While the importance of explicit instruction in spelling has become widely accepted, Tessa discusses why educators should consider a nuanced approach to explicit spelling instruction so that all students can thrive in their learning. Spelling instruction should enable all students to build and deepen their vocabulary; it should be targeted and seek to establish durable, multi-faceted representations of written words that can be accessed and used with automaticity when reading and writing. This presentation introduces educators to an evidence-based, multi-tiered approach to teaching spelling, ensuring that all students have the best opportunity to improve their spelling. Tessa describes how her research provides empirical evidence of Triple Word Form Theory and its related assessment and instructional resources for nuanced, multi-tiered spelling instruction.”

Daffern, T. (2024). Implementing an Effective Multi-tiered System of Support to Teach Spelling. Think Forward Educators.

https://thinkforwardeducators.org/events/multi-tiered-spelling

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Here’s a collection of Daffern’s recent work:

Daffern, T. (2023). Spelling out words: Personal spelling and vocabulary reference book (workbook for students in Year 3 above). Literacy Education Solutions. ISBN: 978-0-6483430-4-2

Daffern, T. (2022). The little compendium of Standard English spelling. Literacy Education Solutions Pty Limited. ISBN: 978-0-6483430-2-8 (2nd edition is now available for preorder on request)

Daffern, T. (2023). The components of spelling: Early Years (CoSTEY). Instruction and assessment for the linguistic inquirer, 2nd Edition Manual. Literacy Education Solutions Pty Limited. ISBN: 978-0-6483430-5-9

Daffern, T. (2021). The components of spelling: 3-6. Instruction and assessment for the linguistic inquirer, 2nd Edition Manual. Literacy Education Solutions Pty Limited. ISBN: 978-0-6483430-3-5

Daffern, T. (2024). Teaching writing conventions. In E. Rata (Ed.), Research Handbook on Curriculum and Education (Vol. Part II Knowledge structures and the curriculum, pp. 228-244): Edward Elgar.

Daffern, T. (2018) Spelling assessment, learning, and instruction in VET. In: McGrath S., Mulder M., Papier J., Suart R. (eds) Handbook of Vocational Education and Training: Developments in the Changing World of Work (pp. 1429–1444). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49789-1_90-1.

Journal articles with her

Daffern, T., Hogg., K., Callaway, N., Wild, H., & Kelly, S. (2024). Supporting schools to implement an evidence-based and effective approach to teaching spelling. Learning Difficulties Australia, 56(3), 31-38.

Daffern, T. (2022). Empowering teachers with an evidence-based spelling pedagogy. Practical Literacy: The Early and Primary Years, 27(2), 14-18.

Daffern, T., & Fleet, R. (2021). Investigating the efficacy of using error analysis data to inform explicit teaching of spelling. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties. 26(1), 67-88. DOI:10.1080/19404158.2021.1881574

Daffern, T., & Sassu, A. (2020). Building morphological foundations. Practical Literacy: The Early and Primary Years, 25(3), 35-37

Daffern, T., & Mackenzie, N. M. (2020). A case study on the challenges of learning and teaching English spelling: Insights from eight Australian students and their teachers. Literacy, 54(3), 99-110. doi: 10.1111/lit.12215

Daffern, T., & Ramful, A. (2020). Measurement of spelling ability: Construction and validation of a phonological, orthographic and morphological pseudo-word instrument. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 33, 571- 603. DOI: 10.1007/s11145-019-09976-1

An impressive Daffern group of relatively recent publications

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Improving the Spelling of Rule-Based Words with Explicit or Implicit Practice (2023)

Purpose

Children make spelling errors despite classroom instruction on phoneme-grapheme connections and spelling rules. We examined whether additional practice helps to decrease the number of spelling errors for a morphological spelling rule. We distinguished explicit practice in applying a spelling rule from implicit exposure to correct word forms.

Method

After a dictation task, Dutch second graders (n = 139; 46.8% girls) were matched and randomly divided over explicit, implicit, and no-additional practice conditions. Additional practice was based on evidence-based exercises and encompassed five sessions. The dictation task included target words that were practiced, as well as transfer words that were not.

Results

Both explicit and implicit practice resulted in better performance on target words (large effect) as well as transfer words (medium to large effect) compared to no-additional practice. There were no differences between implicit and explicit practice.

Conclusion

These findings indicate that spelling performance can be improved by additional practice, both by telling and showing. Using evidence-based explicit or implicit exercises after classroom instruction has taken place can (further) improve children’s spelling of rule-based words.

van den Boer, M., & Bree, E. H. de. (2023). To Show or Tell: Improving the Spelling of Rule-Based Words with Explicit or Implicit Practice. Scientific Studies of Reading, 28(3), 303–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2023.2283636

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Current research supports explicit spelling instruction for better readers. (2022)

“After decades of neglect due to flawed whole language theory, the importance of explicit spelling instruction for reading comprehension is finally getting due diligence in research, paving the way for a resurgence of teaching English spelling in today’s classrooms.

The spelling to read movement spotlights the importance of spelling for orthographic mapping and spelling’s role in automatic word reading which drives reading comprehension. The critical role of spelling for reading is a focus in recent refereed journals in neuroscience and cognitive psychology as well as in recent books by reading scientists and educators (see for example Seidenberg, 2017; Gentry & Ouellette, 2019; Moats, 2020). Landmark studies linking the research to practice have appeared in journals such as Developmental Psychology and Neuroimage. Spelling to read is not only trending in education journals, but in news reports, the media, and with dyslexia advocates and parent groups.

What happened to spelling instruction over the last three decades?

Explicit spelling instruction met its demise with the advent of whole language theory, aspects of which are now wholly debunked by science but regrettably continue to be practiced in classrooms. The late Ken Goodman, whom I studied with and greatly admire for many worthy contributions to reading education, such as promoting humanism and equity for all children, respect and advocacy for teachers, support for writing as a process, and other positive ideals, was dead wrong about spelling, phonics, and handwriting.

In What’s Whole in Whole Language (1986), Professor Goodman catapulted four harmful core educational principles based on flawed theoretical assumptions. These principles have dominated reading education for three decades with perhaps the most disappointing and hurtful being a full-frontal attack on phonics and explicit spelling instruction. The recommendations below from What’s Whole in Whole Language (1986) are direct and unambiguous:

1. Do not teach phonics explicitly because children will intuit phonics by reading. [A settled body of research says that was wrong.]
2. Do not use spelling books or teach spelling explicitly and systematically. Expect children to pick up spelling skills simply by reading and writing. [A settled body of research says that was wrong.]
3. Do not teach handwriting explicitly. Handwriting instruction is too laborious and impedes written expression. [A settled body of research says that was wrong.]
4. Since literacy develops from whole to part [a false assumption], there is no hierarchy of sub-skills or logical grade-by-grade sequence. [A settled body of research says that was wrong.] As it turns out, serial sub-lexical skills are foundational for the development of reading brain circuitry.

These four debunked principles must all be addressed to improve reading instruction moving forward. With much due respect, I am unapologetic for focusing on the four whole language signature missteps because all four are simple to correct. Schools and districts that continue to embrace the four misguided principles or use published curricula that embrace them (see the list below) must simply acknowledge these missteps and correct them. It’s not complicated.

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In a nation and elsewhere where 60% or more children by standardized measures read below proficiency, there is a moral imperative to correct these missteps, especially in schools with vulnerable populations of children who struggle with literacy. The importance that children be taught spelling for reading is incontrovertible.

Sustaining nuggets of wisdom from notable scientists and researchers on the role of spelling for reading:

From cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham, Raising Kids Who Read (2015):

Professor Willingham writes that good readers all read by matching what’s on the page with spelling images in the brain. “ … using word spellings to read requires very little attention, if any. You see it [the word on the page] in the same way you just see and recognize a dog ... As your child gains reading experience, there is a larger and larger set of words that he can read using the spelling, and so his reading becomes faster, smoother, and more accurate. That’s called fluency.”

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From reading scientist and thought leader in the science of reading Professor Mark Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It. (2017):

“In neuroimaging studies, poor readers show atypically low activity in a part of the brain that processes the spelling of words.”

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From Professors Gene Ouellette and Monique Sénéchal’s landmark study in Developmental Psychology (2017):

“…spelling practice transfers to reading improvement in general; recent meta-analyses have shown that spelling instruction benefits word reading across the school years (Graham & Hebert, 2011), and also specifically in the elementary years (Graham & Santangelo, 2014).”

Education Essential Reads

A Simple Strategy to Reduce Academic Anxiety in Dyslexia

Observable Behavior: The Essential Key to Assessing Student Learning

From learning disabilities experts professors Nancy Mather and Lynne Jaffe:

"Spelling requires a much more rigorously established memory of the sequence of letters in a word because it requires the student to recall the sequence in it's entirety. Reading requires orthographic recognition, while spelling requires orthographic recall and application."

From renowned researcher, author, staff developer, and spelling advocate Professor Louisa Moats:

“As a general guide for covering the proposed content [a grade-by-grade spelling curriculum] about 15-20 minutes daily or 30 minutes three times per week should be allocated to spelling instruction. Application in writing should be varied and continual.” (Moats, 2005/2006, p. 42-43).

There must be a reckoning among educators and publishers in order to advance equity and better literacy outcomes especially for vulnerable populations at risk for literacy failure, including children of color, English language learners (ELLs), the economically disadvantaged, and struggling readers at risk of learning disability who aren’t receiving explicit spelling instruction. The major reading programs in the chart above are inadequate for teaching spelling in schools with vulnerable populations. Embrace the spelling-for-reading solution in 2021 by providing systematic, explicit, structured spelling instruction in a grade by grade curriculum.

An Education Week analysis of these programs “found many instances in which these programs diverge from evidence-based practices for teaching reading or supporting struggling students.” (Swartz, 2019. p.1)

References

Gentry, J. R. & Ouellette, G. P. (2019). Brain words: How the science of reading informs teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Stenhouse Publishers.

Graham, S., and Hebert, M.A. (2010). Writing to read: Evidence for how writing can improve reading. A Carnegie Corporation Time to Act Report. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing, 27, 1703–1743. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11145-014-9517-0

Goodman, K.S. (1986). What’s whole in whole language? Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Moats, L. D. (2005/2006). How spelling supports reading: And why it is more regular and predictable than you may think. American Educator, 29(4), 12,14-22, 42-43.

Moats, L.C. (2020). Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers, (Third Edition). Baltimore, MD: Brooks Publishing

Ouelette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2017). Invented spelling in kindergarten as a predictor of reading and spelling in grade 1: A new pathway to literacy, or just the same road, less known? Developmental Psychology, 53(1), 77- 88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000179

Siedenberg, M. (2017). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can’t, and what we can do about it. New York: Hachette Group.

Swartz, S. (2019, December 3). The most popular reading programs aren't backed by science. Education Week, 39(15). https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/12/04/the-most-popular-reading-…

Willingham, D.T. (2015). Raising Kids Who Read. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Mather, N, & Jaffe, L. (2021) Orthographic knowledge is essential for reading and spelling. The Reading League Journal, 2(3) 15-25.

Finished the References above.

The Gentry reference:

Gentry, J.R. (2022. Current research supports explicit spelling instruction for better readers.

Nomanis | Issue 14 | December 2022

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/raising-readers-writers-and-spellers/202101/why-spelling-instruction-should-be-hot-in-2022

https://www.3plearning.com/blog/spelling-strategies-that-work/  09 November, 2020

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Spelling Strategies That Work In Class by Jackson Best (2020)

“For decades, the teaching of spelling has relied heavily on rote learning.

While memorisation has its place, truly effective spelling strategies should also empower students to learn new words independently.

Here are 6 strategies that will give you a break from drilling word lists while equipping your students with spelling confidence.

Spelling strategies for early learners

Chunking

Break words into chunks that are easier to spell (e.g. “planting” can be broken down into [pl] [ant] [ing]). Students will start to recognize familiar patterns and sometimes even find familiar words within new ones.

You can model this process at first, but students should come to do it independently whenever they’re faced with a long or unfamiliar word. Encourage the habit by:

• using a graphic organizer where the individual chunks are clearly separated
• having students write words with different colors for each chunk
• having students cut up a series of words into chunks, which can then be color-coded so they find common patterns (e.g. all “ch” cut-outs are blue).

Rhyming

Rhymes will show students how common sounds often translate to common spellings. Introduce the concept aurally through songs and nursery rhymes and then create rhyming word lists.

Model how changing a single letter in a short word can create rhyme with similar spelling (e.g. “dog”, “fog”, “log”). Students can then see how many words of their own they can generate from a single root (stick to simple words like “all”, “sing”, and “hat”).

Encourage phonetic spelling

Have students spell words phonetically (as they hear them) before memorizing the correct form. It might lead to a few mistakes, but they’ll also realise most words have at least one part that looks exactly like it sounds.

Here’s a phonetic spelling strategy you can use for new words.

1. Slowly read the new word to the whole class, emphasizing each syllable.
2. Students write the word as they hear it.
3. Have students share the spellings of the individual sounds in the word (“So how did we spell the first “thr” sound in “through”?)
4. Have students self-check each phoneme against the correct spelling (e.g. the first three letters of “thru” are correct, so that’s a tick).
5. Discuss the strategies students used to find or remember the correct spelling of each individual phoneme (e.g. comparing it with more familiar words, using a rule).
6. Revise mistakes and come up with new ways of remembering the hard-to-spell parts of the word (e.g. students could create a mnemonic).

The best part of this strategy is that it builds confidence. Students might not spell the whole word correctly, but they’ll realize that they can get plenty of parts correct if they just spell what they hear.

3 Pearnon

Best, J. (2020). Strategies that work.

https://www.3plearning.com/blog/spelling-strategies-that-work/

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How To Make Sure That Your Spelling Instruction Is Explicit (2020)

“Teaching spelling in an explicit and impactful way is not about having the perfect program, but about knowing about the three areas of knowledge that we draw on when we read and spell words. We then need to align our teaching with an explicit approach that provides the most direct path to learning for our students.
Analytic, discovery and inquiry approaches to teaching students about critical patterns in written language simply leave too much to chance, and I think we have a responsibility to make sure that our tier one instruction is robust, inclusive and explicit, so that all children learn exactly what they need to right there in the classroom.”

“I'd like to specifically discuss markers or indicators that we can use to evaluate spelling instruction, to make sure that it is truly explicit and serving the largest number of students possible.

When considering spelling instruction, there are two specific areas to explore. There's the what and the how.

When it comes to what we are teaching, we can think of this in a couple of ways. The first of these centers on knowledge. There are three types of knowledge. There's declarative knowledge, which is the stuff we know, the procedural knowledge, what we can do, and the third element of knowledge is knowing what to do when. This conditional knowledge is the difference between knowing that there are several ways to spell the phoneme k, but that a "ck" is used after a single short vowel.

Knowing that you can spell /k/ with a <c>, a <k> with the diagraphs <ck>, <qu> and <ch> is declarative knowledge.

Being able to write words with these patterns is procedural knowledge: we can do it.

Knowing that the <ck> comes after a single short vowel is conditional knowledge: knowing when to do what. Students need all three types of knowledge to be successful spellers.

So much spelling instruction has focused on procedural knowledge for such a long time. We gave children activities such as look, say, cover, write, check and rainbow writing, but didn't actively build their knowledge of how words work. So that's the first thing to consider in evaluating spelling practice in your school:

How are you building declarative knowledge when it comes to words?

If students are going to develop conditional knowledge about using the grapheme "ck", they need to know what a single short vowel is, not just have said a-e-i-o-u a few times in the classroom, but really know it when asked, unassisted.

Remember, doing and knowing are two different things.

And this brings us to the sticky question of rules. And I say sticky not because they're hard to learn and use, but because there are many, many opinions about their place in instruction.
To me, it's common sense to come to the conclusion that students are helped when they know how words work. Yes, there are the arguments about rules being ineffective because there are too many exceptions, but I think I might have to cover that in a different episode. The short version is that 96% of English spelling is logical (Moats, 2012) when we understand the layers of spelling knowledge, and many spelling features that we might think of as exceptions are actually perfectly logical.
Rules, or, more accurately, generalisations or conventions, do have a place. They help students understand how and why of words, but we don't want to have an approach to spelling that focuses on them exclusively.
That would be pretty boring and actually not that effective.
There needs to be, dare I say it, balance in the areas of instruction we focus on.

Three Interconnected and Specific Areas of Word Knowledge

This brings me to the next point, about the kinds of knowledge we need to help our students develop, and there are three specific areas of word knowledge: phonics, orthography and morphology.
There are interconnections between all three of these, but they are three broad categories that we can think about. When we read and spell, we use knowledge of all of these to help us. That's the crux of a multi-linguistic approach to reading and spelling.
It makes perfect sense to me that we draw knowledge of all of this to understand words and that we shouldn't focus on just one exclusively. So this is the next point of reflection when it comes to spelling instruction in schools,

Are we teaching students about all of these areas in an appropriate time and appropriate way?

Are we teaching phonics, orthography and morphology as we need to be?

The question then becomes,

When is it appropriate to teach what?

There are two competing perspectives on this. (Templeton, 2020)

One is Stage Theory that says students need to develop proficiency in one area of word knowledge before moving on. In this hierarchical approach, students would need to show themselves to be proficient with phonics before moving on to learning about spelling rules.

The other theory is called Repertoire or Wave Theory, which identifies broader overlapping phases through which a child focuses on learning. And this learning is aligned to the information they are most likely to use to engage with reading and spelling words at this stage of development. Repertoire Theory says that a child will access knowledge about how to spell a word based on how much knowledge they have and which area of knowledge is predominantly represented or important in a particular word. You'll find the references about all of this in the show notes.

Those supporting Stage Theory and Repertoire Theory generally agree on what needs to be taught, but differ in their perspective on how much and when.

This brings me to the how of thinking about spelling instruction. For this we can draw on several theories and sources of information, including Cognitive Load Theory, Information Processing Theory, evidence about explicit teaching, direct evidence from instructional research and what we see in how our students respond to instruction.

Now, anecdotes are not robust evidence, to be sure, but I do think that there is a place for us to consider the response of our students to instruction, and use data and student growth indicators to evaluate our practices and approaches. We might think we're using a strong, evidence-informed approach to instruction, but if our students can't spell, it's not working.
If our students are reaching a certain point in their literacy development and stalling, questions need to be asked. It might not be the what of the teaching that needs addressing, it might be an aspect of the how that needs adjusting.
To dive a little deeper into that, have a listen to episode eight of season two of the podcast called Why Isn't my Tier One Instruction Working, and you may find some helpful information there.

So let's get back to our discussion of the method of spelling instruction and what we can reflect on here. The first thing I'd like to ask you to think about is the difference between explicit and intentional teaching. And there are a lot of claims about explicit teaching, every man and his dog is claiming that their approach is evidence-based and explicit, but we have to know what that really means, because intentional teaching and explicit teaching are not necessarily the same thing, even though many people use those terms interchangeably.
Intentional teaching means that we have the goal of students learning something. It's entirely possible to be intentional but not be explicit.
Explicit instruction means that we are applying Rosenshine's Principles (Rosenshine, 2012), something that we do in all aspects of the resources and programs that we create 

Strong, explicit instruction breaks content down into small chunks.
It introduces them directly, as in, it doesn't ask students to discover or find the learning themselves.

If your approach to spelling instruction begins with students examining passages, sentences or whole words, or even begins with the reading of a picture book, it's not explicit, it's analytical. Sure, there is the intention to teach a certain grapheme, rule or morpheme, but you're working from larger units to smaller, not just telling the student what they need to know and directing their attention to what they need to think about.

My reasoning here, and why I'm saying this, is related to what we know about attention and human memory.
That is, we can focus on one new thing at a time. If we're asking students to examine a passage to locate all of the words that contain A, or introducing four ways to spell the sound A at a time, how many new things are we actually asking students to think about? It's not one, it's many more than that. And right there, we are setting many students up to fail. We're asking them to sift through the information we're giving them to find the learning. Yes, there will be students who are just fine with such instruction and have done okay with an analytical approach. I'm not here to tell you that an analytical approach to spelling doesn't work, but there are many students who did just fine with a sight word program and leveled text from the first week of the Foundation year. That's not the point.

The point is that there are far too many students who go through the motions of an analytical, context-embedded approach to instruction, not actually learning what they need to. And if you don't believe me, look at your students and your data. These students reach year six and into secondary school still unsure about basic spelling.

How To Make Sure That Your Spelling Instruction Is Explicit.

The Structured Literacy Podcast (2020)

Jocelyn Seamer

https://www.jocelynseamereducation.com/

https://www.jocelynseamereducation.com/blog/98537-how-to-make-sure-that-your-spelling

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The SpellEx approach to teaching spelling (2024)

https://www.nomanis.com.au/blog/the-spellex-approach-to-teaching-spelling

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“When we spell words, we write the letters in a way that conforms to an accepted set of conventions. For example, we know the words ‘hoping’ and ‘hopping’ have different pronunciations and different meanings signalled by the way they are spelled. We also know that English words can end with the sound /v/ but generally don’t end with the letter ‘v’ (‘glove’ rather than ‘glov’). Some consider spelling hard to teach, and this is mainly due to the complex nature of the English language.

English is considered to have a deep orthography. This means that there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds or graphemes and phonemes. But it turns out that English spelling is more regular than most people believe (Moats, 2005) and can be successfully taught using a rule-based approach. An analysis conducted by Hanna et al. (1966) found that only about 4% of English words are truly irregular; the rest are regular, mostly regular or can be spelled using knowledge of word meanings and word origins. While it would be overwhelming to teach every spelling rule, there is enough regularity in the English language to make it worth spending the time on the teaching of patterns, conventions and important rules.

The importance of spelling

There are many reasons why spelling is important. Spelling is crucial for effective written communication. Correct spelling ensures that a message is conveyed clearly and contributes to coherent writing in essays, reports or articles. Beyond the school years, spelling is considered important for job opportunities. In addition to being required for jobs involving writing, good spelling on job applications and CVs can impact the chances of being considered for a position (Pan et al., 2021).

Spelling is clearly important for writing development (Daffern, 2017; Hutcheon et al., 2012; Moats, 2009; Sayeski, 2011). It is a lower-level writing skill and is said to be part of the mechanics of writing (along with typing skills and handwriting). Ensuring children are able to spell words automatically makes writing easier (Joshi et al., 2008) because it frees up working memory for other aspects of writing, such as getting ideas down on paper and making revisions while writing (Graham & Santangelo, 2014). Also, if children can spell more difficult words, they are more likely to use these in their writing. For example, they may choose the word ‘miserable’ rather than ‘sad’ if they can spell it.

It is sometimes suggested that students don’t need spelling skills because they can use technology such as ‘spellcheck’ and ‘autocorrect’ when they write (assuming they are typing rather than handwriting, of course). While this technology may help to reduce some spelling errors, it is certainly not foolproof. To benefit from technology that assists with spelling, you need to have some idea of how to spell the word to type it in the first place. Then you are often required to make the correct choice from multiple options. In addition, sometimes we type a word that is spelled correctly but isn’t the intended word (for example, your/you’re or bred/bread).

The consequences of poor spelling can be far-reaching. Poor spelling not only affects written expression, but it can result in harsh judgement (even when the content of a text is sound). This can cause embarrassment and hamper further writing development.

Spelling is also important for reading development (Ehri, 2000; Graham & Santangelo, 2014; Joshi
et al., 2008; Moats, 2005; Sayeski, 2011). Just as good phonemic awareness and phonics skills are critical for reading, they are also essential for the development of good spelling (Sayeski, 2011; Simonsen & Gunter, 2001). And early spelling ability is an important predictor of later reading performance (Treiman et al., 2019). It has been shown that we can improve reading decoding skills by providing good instruction in spelling (Graham & Hebert, 2011; Graham & Santangelo, 2014; Moats, 2005). Moreover, because spelling instruction has the added benefit of supporting the development of vocabulary (Moats, 2005), it is also highly correlated with reading comprehension (Joshi et al., 2008)”.

Conclusion

“Spelling is important for writing and reading, as well as for success in post-school life. Research on spelling development tells us that children need to learn to use phonological, orthographic, morphological and etymological information in order to spell well. In addition, research suggests that we need to teach spelling formally and in a way that is language-based. SpellEx is a whole-class Tier 1 spelling program that uses explicit, language-based instruction to teach spelling to children from Year 3 onwards.”

Alison Madelaine. (2024). The SpellEx approach to teaching spelling. Nomanis

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Exploring Australian Students' Spelling Skills (2020)

“An analysis of national trends in Australian students’ spelling based on NAPLAN results and 2020 research involving 2436 NSW students in Years 1 and 2. This paper focuses on the importance of developing phonological, orthographic and morphological spelling skills concurrently from the earliest years of schooling and provides insights across the early, middle and upper primary years.

Exploring Australian Students' Spelling Skills. Oxford University Press. https://www.oup.com.au/primary/english/exploring-australian-students-spelling-skills

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Capturing variations in how spelling is taught in primary school classrooms in England (2022).

“Mastering spelling is important for children to progress in writing. The National Curriculum in England details spelling lists linked to each year group in primary education. Assessment practices also emphasise the importance of teaching spelling.

However, to date, little is known about how teachers feel about teaching spelling nor the instructional methods that they use in primary schools in England. This study addresses this gap by investigating approaches to teaching spelling.

An online survey was distributed to primary-based teaching staff with roles in supporting teaching and learning. The survey asked for information about the respondents’ teaching experience and school setting, and about their attitudes and approach to teaching spelling. The survey was completed in full by 158 respondents.

Approaches to teaching spelling were varied and over two-thirds of the sample highlighted that their school did not have a spelling policy. The importance of explicit teaching of spelling was supported by the majority of teachers. This judgement was more frequent and rated more highly by teachers supporting younger children.

Teachers largely reported devising their own spelling resources, highlighted that the curriculum spelling lists lack guidance for teaching spelling strategies and questioned their suitability for pupils of varying abilities. A range of spelling programmes and strategies were recorded. The findings provide insight into universal instructional approaches. Practical implications for teacher training and professional development are discussed.”

Assessment practices throughout education largely rely on children and young people being able to demonstrate their knowledge through writing. Learning to spell is an important part of learning to write. Writing frameworks situate spelling alongside handwriting as a ‘transcription’ skill and suggest that over time spelling must become automatic in order to free resources to be devoted to higher-level composition processes, such as generating text and self-regulating planning and reviewing behaviour (Berninger & Amtmann, 2003).

Here, spelling is viewed as a foundational skill that is cognitively challenging in the early years of education but one that children must master to be able to progress in writing (Kim et al., 2011; Wagner et al., 2011). Indeed, spelling ability has been consistently shown to relate to writing outcomes.

Better spellers produce longer written narratives, use more diverse written vocabulary and write texts that are graded as higher quality than those that present with spelling difficulties (Sumner et al., 2013). Research has also demonstrated the negative biases that occur in teacher assessment when scoring written texts that contain a high proportion of spelling errors, leading to misjudgement of compositional quality (Graham et al., 2011). Thus, it is imperative that spelling is taught effectively in primary school.”

“The present study provides insight into teachers’ beliefs around spelling and current practices. The English curriculum provides guidance for teachers on the standards and expectations for children at different stages of development; however there are gaps between expectations and how these can be achieved (i.e. successful strategies for teaching spelling), resulting in variations and inconsistencies in instructional practices.

Few schools have an explicit spelling policy to support the consistency of teaching spelling. Spelling is taught more frequently in the younger primary grades and specialist literacy teachers who typically work with those with special educational needs feel more confident in supporting spelling than class teachers. Teachers are lacking confidence in their ability to teach spelling and notably teaching staff report creating their own spelling resources or relying on resources and strategies that we do not yet have evidence for their effectiveness.

Detailed information about the content of these resources was beyond the scope of this study. Of note, at present, there is a dissociation between theories of spelling development, which highlight the importance of phonology, orthography and morphology (Berninger et al., 2010), and classroom instructional practices, which focus largely on phonics and memorisation approaches.

Future studies should examine the content of teacher-created resources and evaluate the extent to which they are informed by research evidence. Reflections on professional development have also been made. The importance of developing a consistent dialogue between teachers and researchers in narrowing the research to practice gap and encouraging a knowledge-exchange process is acknowledged, as greater awareness of teacher pedagogical approaches to spelling will in turn inform future practice in classrooms (Nutley et al., 2003; Shucksmith, 2016).”

Esposito, R., Herbert, E., Sumner, E. (2022). Capturing variations in how spelling is taught in primary school classrooms in England. British Educational Research Journal Volume 49, Issue 1,70-92. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3829

https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/berj.3829

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A New Research-Based High-Frequency Wordlist (2024)

“The cpb sight words improve on existing sight word lists, the latter being among the most widely used resources in early reading instruction, yet also among the least methodologically rigorous. This study has reviewed the limitations of the Dolch (1936) and Fry (1980) resources, which have not been updated for 50–100 years and suffer from sampling and methodological problems.

Commercial products' sight words come with costs, may not generalize beyond the product, nor have ever passed peer review. This paper provides teachers a sight word list that has been generated based on a thorough analysis of data representing children's picture books and contributes a valuable pedagogical resource for initial reading instruction: a new sight word list based on up-to-date research methods and freely available to the community.”

“Our review shows a range of problems with existing sight word lists. This stands in contrast to the rigorous methods that have developed over recent decades in pedagogical wordlist research. Examples include the WordZones (Hiebert, 2020), the General Utility Words (Graves et al., 2019), the Middle School Academic Wordlist (Greene & Coxhead, 2015), and the Secondary Vocabulary Lists (Green & Lambert, 2018).

These resources, designed for vocabulary building at later grades following initial print instruction, have used large, principled samples of language, consistent definitions of a word, and made decisions about which words were of value based on frequency and dispersion (i.e., whether it occurs in many different texts).

Advanced methods for language research have been established for decades, yet have not been used to improve sight word lists for teachers. This, therefore, is the aim of the current study. The cpb sight words are the product of recent methodological and theoretical advances. Unlike previous sight word lists, the new list is based on computing mean text frequencies as the basis for ranking words for instruction rather than overall frequencies of words in a corpus (Egbert & Burch, 2023). To explain, mean text frequency is the average frequency of a word across different texts. This provides a better measure of how often children are exposed to a word in print, because it considers frequencies in texts, and texts are meaningful units of print exposure to the child, as opposed to simply the overall frequency of a word in some corpus, which is not a meaningful unit of text.”

Green, C., Keogh, K. and Prout, J. (2024). The CPB Sight Words: A New Research-Based High-Frequency Wordlist for Early Reading Instruction. Read Teach, 78: 56-64. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2309

This next segment is a broader document, and includes earlier periods.

 Underlying principles from research:

Fluency in lower order processes is necessary for success in higher order processes (e.g., decoding for comprehension, spelling for writing, tables for problem solving).

Practice is the key to fluency. e.g., knitting, topspin backhand, reading, spelling, writing. Initially, corrective feedback is vital, followed by spaced independent practice.

Using skill is fun; acquiring skill (learning) may not be fun!

 Old belief shown to be wrong: Naturally unfolding development.

"Children learn spelling without direct instruction if they read and write" (Goodman, 1989). 

Nup!

Old belief shown to be wrong: If you don’t get it easily, you can’t get it ever!

“If your daughter struggles with spelling, she should simply make sure she marries a good speller” (Donald Graves, 1983).

Whaaat!

Old belief shown to be wrong: Spelling's not really that important anyway, as long as communication takes place?

Yes, it’s important because spelling is a lower order skill that drives writing quality. Misspelling can also disrupt meaning:

When spelling is effortful, writing quality becomes limited by the need to concentrate on intra-word structure rather than meaning. Similarly, dysfluent handwriting slows the creative process, and interferes with real time planning. Additionally, a lack of facility with grammar hinders sentence construction, and hence expressive writing. The quality of handwriting and spelling have been found to be the best predictors of the amount and quality of written composition.

Unfortunately, current educational practice minimizes explicit instruction and practice of such skills (British Primary Framework for Literacy, 2006; McNeill & Kirk, 2014).

 “Learning correct spelling is important for several reasons: First, misspellings can cause errors and difficulties in comprehension. Second, readers may develop negative impressions of a writer’s arguments if his prose contains misspelled words (1). And finally, learning conventional spellings of words allows people to read the words more quickly (2) and concentrate on ideas rather than spelling.” ... How children should learn to spell is controversial. In this article, I have argued that the goal of spelling instruction is for children to understand how their writing system works. Children learn about some aspects of spelling on their own, including from exposure to written words while reading, but reading experience is insufficient for children to spell proficiently. The traditional instructional method—having children look at spellings, visualize them mentally, and try to reproduce them—does little to help them understand the workings of the writing system. Phonics instruction goes some way toward this goal, but more comprehensive instruction is needed to present a full picture." (p. 1, 5)

Treiman, R. (2018). Teaching and learning spelling. Child Development Perspectives, 0(0), 1–5.

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