essay about the importance of spelling in literacy development

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Learning and Development: Why is Spelling So Important?

Spelling and the written word are often taken for granted – particularly by adults. This is no surprise given that these core elements of learning and development happened in our formative years, which can often seem like a lifetime ago. However, where children are concerned, the process of learning to spell is of critical importance; therefore, understanding how and why we learn to spell – and how crucial it is – is essential for their development. And, given that we play such a huge role in their early learning, it is vital to fully grasp the gravity of this concept in order to help our children to the greatest possible degree. 

Before we delve deep into the heart of this topic, let’s outline three primary reasons why spelling is so important:

#1 – Communication:  Spelling is a vital element of communication.

#2 – Literacy:  Reading and spelling are very closely linked and help to develop and improve general literacy. 

#3 – Employment:  Employment opportunities can be directly impacted by spelling ability and quality.  

Despite the advances of technology and the influx of autocorrect and spelling software, apps, and programs, the importance of spelling hasn’t diminished; in fact, it’s never been more important. But why is this? Let’s find out.

Spelling: Why It Is Still So Important

Development and learning aren’t just about there here and now; it also impacts the future. Therefore, it’s essential to understand how and what poor spelling may adversely affect your child’s formative and future years. Lack of spelling ability can interfere with:

Basic Communication

Did you know that almost 85% of people around the globe have Internet access and have the ability to receive emails? Furthermore, were you aware that over 60% of these people communicate through some form of online social media? The scope of risk (of inability to communicate) can be trivial, like sending an email to the wrong person, to deadly, if sending a person instructions for something that may have a direct impact upon their health – prescription instructions, for example. 

With an exponential growth in online recruitment, job posting, and job hunting, giving off the right first impression is crucial – and that will typically begin with an employee’s CV or resume. While a person reading a job application might have some degree or flexibility/be willing to forgive a misspelling or two, AI-based tracking systems that scan applications have no remorse for spelling errors whatsoever. Furthermore, employers will often check potential employees social media to analyse their suitability for the role in question.

Trustworthiness

Whether you’re an individual or a business, perceived trustworthiness is vital. Tolerance for incorrect selling is incredibly low. On business materials, it makes the producer of say materials look careless, unintelligent, and potentially even cheap. Given that many online scams often carry misspellings, and poor punctuation and poor grammar, a poorly written email, marketing brochure or document can have a similar impact on the reader. 

The Impact of Spelling on Development of Communication Skills

Communication skills are absolutely vital for children to develop and interact in a successful manner with the world around them. Early communication centres around basic body language, such as simple gestures and vocalisations. As a child gets older, communication progresses to verbal form, which facilitates an early understanding of a child’s native language. 

The next stage – establishing a connection between verbal and written communication – is far, far more complex, and certainly requires the marriage of observation with formal instruction. At this point in time, the foundational abilities and skills required for successful and adept written communication are learnt, such as recognising letters by sight and having the ability to correlate written patterns with vocal expressions. 

The Role of Spelling in Literacy Development

Spelling, the ability to correctly construct words from letters alone, is without a shadow of a doubt one of the vital components required for successful writing. Confidence where spelling is cornered often reinforces and builds confidence in other aspects of literacy and development. The ability to understand the associations between words of the same origin and word relationships has been shown to enhance comprehension skills. In fact, research has discovered that writing, reading, comprehension, and spelling skills are inextricably (and closely) linked. Studies have shown that spelling instruction can enhance reading skills, as it enables the learner to expand their grasp of the ‘alphabetic system’ as it is utilised in reading.

Teaching children (and those new to spelling) techniques, strategies, and rules to expand their vocabulary and spelling knowledge will benefit them in a myriad of ways, both with regard to learning and in everyday life and situations.

Children who feel confident using letters and word patterns have the ability to read and understand more challenging texts. Furthermore, the adept in these areas gain the required language tools to better articulate their own ideas via both verbal and written communication. Although the relationship between written letters/words and sounds can appear arbitrary and sometimes difficult for many children, building a solid foundational grasp of the associations between letters, words, forms, and sounds is crucial for confident communication.

Why is Spelling So Important?: A Summary

Understanding the role spelling plays in all facets of learning, development, and, indeed, life in general, is absolutely key. A child’s ability to spell can have long- and far-reaching impacts upon their present and future learning, in addition to their ability to successfully interact and communicate with the world around them. Of course, all aspects of literacy and learning are crucial to a child’s development, but the ability to spell (and spell well) is probably the most important of them all. 

How Spelling Affects Reading and Writing

• #Expert Insight

Spelling is one of the most forgotten aspects of literacy development. In many classroom settings, it is looked at as an afterthought, and instruction is limited to rote spelling drills and memorization  (Birsh, 2005) .

Spelling is one of the most important and most forgotten aspects of literacy development . In many classroom settings, it is looked at as an afterthought, and instruction is limited to rote spelling drills and memorization (Birsh, 2005) .

What’s more concerning is that we do not know how many of our students are struggling with spelling, and to what standard, because state assessments rarely include a direct measure of spelling competence.

The truth is that learning to read, write, and spell all help reinforce each other. Moreover, learning to spell enhances reading, writing, and literacy skills for young children in elementary school.

By learning the rules of spelling, students are able to develop a deeper understanding of the English language. They’re able to develop skills such as:

• Phonics & Phonetics
• Orthography (conventional spelling rules, grammar, punctuation)
• Morphology (prefixes, suffixes, base word analysis)

Spelling Drills

When all is said and done, approximately 87% of English words are reliable to read and spell if orthographic patterns have been mastered (Hanna et al., 1966).

However, that’s not to say students will develop important spelling skills as a product of learning to read and write. Research indicates that learning to spell is a more complicated process than learning to read. It requires direct, explicit instruction, just like reading.

Without that direct and explicit spelling instruction, many children will struggle to spell (and write) even if their reading is at or above grade level (Brady & Moats, 1997) .

Spelling and Reading

Research has shown that “spelling and reading build and rely on the same mental representation of a word. Knowing the spelling of a word makes the representation of it sturdy and accessible for fluent reading.” (Snow et al., 2005) .

While children can memorize how to spell a few dozen words, they will eventually begin to struggle if they do not understand the relationship between the sounds ( phonemes ) and letters (graphemes) in words.

Words are not visually distinctive (i.e. car, can, cane), so learning to spell requires direct, explicit instruction. The knowledge about symbols, speech sounds, and meaning actually supports the memory of whole words and helps with reading.

So, in addition to continuing to learn the rules of spelling and orthography, students begin to develop a deeper understanding of the English language. The instruction can include:

• Meanings of roots, prefixes, and suffixes
• Families of related words
• Historical development of the English language
• Language of origin

This sort of word study enhances vocabulary development and facilitates word recognition and reading comprehension. It enables students to look at any new word from the angles of sound, syntax, language of origin, and meaning.

Spelling and Writing

Just like reading, there is a strong relationship between spelling and writing, emphasizing the importance of spelling further. Specifically, poor spelling greatly affects a student’s ability to write efficiently and effectively.

If a child is spending too much time and valuable cognitive resources thinking about how to spell, they are taking away from higher-level aspects of composition and comprehension.

How to Teach Spelling

If you think about it, writing can be much more of a juggling act than reading. Students must use orthography, semantics, syntax, and discourse organization skills.

The goal is for students to be able to deploy those skills automatically. By achieving that, writers can keep track of the topic, organization, word choice, and audience needs.

When a writer who struggles with spelling is tackling an assignment, it’s not uncommon that they restrict their writing to words they can spell. That results in a loss of verbal power and the individual losing their train of thought attempting to spell words.

Spelling and writing are integral parts of literacy instruction and must be included systematically and explicitly in any literacy program. Explicit spelling and writing instruction is even more important for students with dyslexia or other reading difficulties.

And for those who argue that spell-check is any sort of alternative, it isn’t quite that simple. Students who really struggle with spelling do not always produce close enough approximations to the word for spell-check to come up with the correct suggestion. All-in-all, spell-check can’t replace the importance of spelling.

So, Why Is Spelling Important?

An important thing to remember when it comes to spelling instruction is that it’s not the age of the student, it is the stage of their development. Students should not be forced to memorize spelling patterns but should be taught in a systematic, sequential format.

Spelling assessments that focus on rote memorization and random words are not effective. Instead, spelling assessments should focus on concepts that were explicitly taught.  They should only be spelling words that correlate with their skill level in phonics, phonological awareness, orthography, and morphology.

It’s also important that educators know when to correct spelling and when to allow for inventive spelling based on the student’s understanding of phonemes and graphemes.

Sign up for our LIVE virtual Orton-Gillingham training ! We are now offering half-day, evening, and weekend options to best fit your schedule. 

The IMSE approach allows teachers to incorporate the five components essential to an effective reading program into their daily lessons: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

The approach is based on the Orton-Gillingham methodology and focuses on explicit, direct instruction that is sequential, structured, and multi-sensory.

It is IMSE’s mission that all children must have the ability to read to fully realize their potential. We are committed to providing teachers with the knowledge and tools to prepare future minds.

Does Spelling Still Matter—and If So, How Should It Be Taught? Perspectives from Contemporary and Historical Research

• Review Article
• Open access
• Published: 30 March 2021
• Volume 33 , pages 1523–1552, ( 2021 )

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• Steven C. Pan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9080-5651 1 ,
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• Robert A. Bjork 1  

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A century ago, spelling skills were highly valued and widely taught in schools using traditional methods, such as weekly lists, drill exercises, and low- and high-stakes spelling tests. That approach was featured in best-selling textbooks such as the Horn-Ashbaugh Speller of 1920. In the early 21st century, however, skepticism as to the importance of spelling has grown, some schools have deemphasized or abandoned spelling instruction altogether, and there has been a proliferation of non-traditional approaches to teaching spelling. These trends invite a reevaluation of the role of spelling in modern English-speaking societies and whether the subject should be explicitly taught (and if so, what are research-supported methods for doing so). In this article, we examine the literature to address whether spelling skills are still important enough to be taught, summarize relevant evidence, and argue that a comparison of common approaches to spelling instruction in the early 20th century versus more recent approaches provides some valuable insights. We also discuss the value of explicit spelling instruction and highlight potentially effective ways to implement such instruction, including the use of spelling tests. Overall, our goals are to better characterize the role of spelling skills in today’s society and to identify several pedagogical approaches—some derived from traditional methods and others that are more recent—that hold promise for developing such skills in efficient and effective ways.

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One of the most successful spelling textbooks of the 20th century, the Horn-Ashbaugh Speller , began its print run in 1920. Written by Ernest Horn and Ernest Ashbaugh, both professors of education at the State University of Iowa, the postcard-sized textbook represented the state-of-the-art (at the time) in evidence-based spelling instruction. The Speller contained grade-appropriate lists totaling 4578 words and prescribed a daily routine of testing, writing, and word study exercises. Over multiple editions, it became a bestseller in the USA and was, for at least 25 years (Ruan & Griffiths, 2007 ), a constant companion to millions of 1st–8th grade students.

A century later, spelling textbooks continue to be published, but many educators no longer regard them as essential. In fact, in recent years, a growing number of schools in the USA and at least several schools in the UK have deemphasized or eliminated traditional methods of explicit spelling instruction—that is, pedagogical activities that focus on the deliberate teaching of spelling—such as weekly word lists and spelling tests (Barker & Puente, 2013 ; BBC News, 2008 ; Gentry, 2011 ; Mellon, 2009 ; Murray, 2015 ; Shalash, 2011 ; see also Cheek, 2016 ; Dewar, 2017 ; Fry, 2015 ; Sultan, 2010 ; Woo, 1997 ). Approximately 250 schools and counting have implemented these changes (for a partial list, see Table 1 ). Moreover, measures of spelling ability no longer appear on standardized tests in some US states, and standalone assessments of spelling skills have also been phased out in other cases (Denn, 2019 ). Some observers even suggest that technological innovations have rendered spelling skills obsolete (Klein, 2013 ; Trubek, 2012 ). These developments raise important questions, including: Does spelling still matter in the 21st century, and if so, should schools continue teaching it? Are historically prominent approaches to spelling instruction, including a dedicated spelling curriculum and the use of spelling tests as promoted by the Speller and other textbooks, still pertinent today? Or are those practices truly obsolete? In this article, which draws from the vast spelling literature and highlights both contemporary and historical perspectives, we examine relevant research in search of answers.

Are Spelling Skills Still Important to Learn?

The Speller advised teachers to introduce the topic of spelling thusly: “Begin by pointing out the importance of spelling. Give cases if possible, where people have been discredited because of spelling errors in letters.” (E. Horn & Ashbaugh, 1920 , p. xi). That advice reflected a societal approbation of the ability to spell—which at the time could be defined as the capacity to write words that conform to the orthography of a given language—that had been pervasive since at least the 16th century and grew in importance with the rise of the printing press and printed books (Venesky, 1980 ; e.g., Coote, 1596 ; Webster, 1783 ). In the last decade, however, skepticism about the value of spelling skills, including from instructors, school administrators, commentators, and members of the general public, has become increasingly prevalent. Among claims used to justify such skepticism, three of the most common are: (a) incorrect spelling is no longer penalized on many standardized tests (Denn, 2019 ); (b) widely used technologies that automate the spelling process, such as spellcheck and autocorrect, reduce the need to be a good speller (Stewart, 2013 ); and (c) the proliferation of different ways to spell many frequently used words, as has occurred via text messaging, email, and other casual forms of communication, obviates the very concept of correct spelling (Trubek, 2012 ). Perhaps not coincidentally, the propagation of these claims coincides with the decline of spelling instruction in some schools.

The devaluation of spelling skills is exemplified in recent quotes published in education magazines and in the popular press. For instance, in a 2013 Times Educational Supplement interview, a professor of educational technology opined, “The emphasis on grammar and spelling, I find a bit unnecessary because they are skills that were essential maybe a hundred years ago but they are not right now,” and moreover, “my phone corrects my spelling so I don’t really need to think about it” (Stewart, 2013 ). Regarding job resumés, a Financial Times columnist claimed in 2014 that “typos and spelling mistakes don’t really matter” except “only if I were trying to hire a proofreader” (Kellaway, 2014 ). An opinion piece in Wired magazine even asserted that “English spelling is a terrible mess anyway, full of arbitrary contrivances and exceptions that outnumber rules,” and hence “it would be far better to loosen our idea of correct spelling” (Trubek, 2012 ; cf. Koerner, 2012 ).

Throughout much of the 20th century, such comments would likely have been met with skepticism and even horror (with the possible exception of complaints about the irregularity of English spelling, which Noah Webster, Theodore Roosevelt, and others attempted to address). Among most contemporary reading and other literacy researchers, the importance of spelling remains undisputed. Recently, however, not only have comments expressing skepticism about the value of spelling received widespread circulation, but in many cases, those comments have gone completely unchallenged. In tandem with that attitudinal shift, the problem of subpar spelling skills remains fairly widespread: elementary school teachers still commonly report spelling difficulties among their students (e.g., 27% of students according to a national US survey conducted by Graham et al., 2008 ). Some instructors have also noted increases in error-prone and informal styles of writing among their students, particularly in emails (Epstein, 2006 ; Flaherty, 2019 ; Glater, 2006 ). That trend is partially substantiated by corpus data: Constantinou et al. ( 2020 ) and Constantinou and Chambers ( 2020 ) found evidence of decreasing formality in writing style (e.g., inconsistent tense use) and a greater use of non-standard English (e.g., lack of subject-verb agreement) in UK student writing samples collected in 2014 versus 2004. The increased use of electronic methods of communication wherein correct spelling and formal writing style are not required may also be a factor: survey data indicate a shift toward informal writing styles among US teenagers (Lenhart et al., 2008 ), although such shifts have not yet supplanted traditional approaches to writing (Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008 ). In an effort to forestall a further deterioration of writing standards, some institutions have recently developed “netiquette” guidelines with reminders to use proper grammar and correct spelling in electronic communication (e.g., Arizona State University, 2020 ; Bestler, 2015 ; Oregon Institute of Technology, 2018 ).

Psychological Appraisals and Consequences of Spelling Errors

Contrary to the assertions of skeptics, an examination of research on how human beings view spelling errors suggests that the longstanding approbation of spelling skills remains justified. First, consider the employment sector: In industries ranging from accounting to technology services, spelling and other writing skills are frequently used and prized by recruiters (e.g., Christensen & Rees, 2002 ; Martin-Lacroux and Lacroux, 2017 ; see also National Commission on Writing, 2004 , 2005 ). Spelling skills may also be considered in promotion decisions. Accordingly, the presence of spelling errors in resumés and other application materials, which are often quickly scanned during an initial screening stage, can be devastating: In a survey conducted by human resources firm Adecco ( 2013 ), 43% of recruiters listed spelling errors as sufficient grounds for immediate rejection. Additionally, in experiments wherein professional recruiters rated application forms, the presence of spelling errors significantly damaged applicants’ chances at being shortlisted (e.g., Martin-Lacroux and Lacroux, 2017 ). Spelling errors can also substantially worsen recruiters’ impressions of a candidate’s professional capabilities (Martin-Lacroux, 2017 ), including assessments of their level of attention to detail and concern about the quality of their writing (Barker & Puente, 2013 ). Thus, contrary to claims that spelling skills are rarely considered in the workplace and/or should be regarded as unimportant (Kellaway, 2014 ), data on hiring and promotion practices suggest that such skills remain valuable.

Spelling errors can also be costly for companies and organizations. If a potential customer notices even one spelling error in an advertisement, for example, then their interest in the advertised business drops (Mozafari et al., 2019 ). If an online review contains spelling errors, then readers form a less positive impression of the company being reviewed; although the review is, also regarded as less credible (Cooper et al., 2020 ). Spelling errors on commercial websites can negatively impact sales and consumer attitudes (Everard & Galletta, 2005 ; Stiff, 2012 ), with up to half of sales lost because customers doubt the credibility of incorrectly spelled information ((according to some estimates; e.g., Coughlan, 2011 ). Relatedly, security experts commonly advise treating websites and emails with spelling errors as potentially fraudulent (e.g., Consumer Reports, 2012 ). Companies and other organizations have a vested interest, therefore, in prioritizing correct spelling in customer interactions and in promotions of products or services that they make or market.

More broadly, spelling errors often negatively impact the perception of writers and their writing. In fact, Varnhagen ( 2000 ) found that even 2nd, 4th, and 6th grade students gave lower quality ratings and rated writers more poorly after reading a story that contained spelling errors, as opposed to a story that contained no such errors. Negative ratings increased with both age and grade, suggesting that correct spelling is increasingly valued as individuals mature. Kreiner et al. ( 2002 ) found that the presence of spelling errors caused adults to give lower ratings of authors’ writing abilities, and in some cases, lower ratings of authors’ intellectual ability as well. Further, when told that a writer had access to spellcheck software, readers were still more likely to blame the writer than spellcheck for any spelling errors (Figueredo & Varnhagen, 2005 ). Hence, the responsibility for producing error-free text remains with the writer. Spelling also matters online: In web forum discussions, misspelled posts are more likely to be questioned than are correctly spelled posts, with such errors also thought to decrease the credibility of the author (Jeong et al., 2017 ; see also Liu, 2004 ; Morris et al., 2012 ). These findings all suggest that correct spelling confers a “halo effect”—that is, beyond simply aiding a writer’s ability to communicate effectively, a lack of spelling errors can improve perceptions of their credibility and qualifications—and, conversely, the presence of such errors can lower such perceptions.

Among educational assessments, the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) and other major standardized tests do not assess spelling or penalize spelling errors. Hence, spelling is arguably unimportant when taking such tests. However, the current US Common Core State Standards feature specific spelling benchmarks starting at grade 3 (Gentry, 2013 ; Reed, 2012 ), thus giving schools cause to evaluate spelling skills, and some states have added penalties in their standardized tests for incorrect spelling (e.g., the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test began doing so in 2012). Moreover, 11-year old students in the UK are required to take the Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar (SPaG) test (Department of Education, 2013 ). Thus, despite a lack of spelling assessments in some school districts and on some standardized tests (which complicates efforts to systematically track spelling ability over time), spelling still matters in various educational settings where it is directly evaluated.

Spelling Skills in the Era of Spellcheck, Autocorrect, and Text Messaging

Although spelling errors have historically ranked at or near the top of lists of the most common mistakes that writers make (Johnson, 1917 , Hodges, 1941 ), the advent of spellcheck software, which highlight spelling errors and can suggest correctly spelled replacements, and autocorrect or autocomplete software, which attempts to automatically replace misspellings with correctly spelled words, appears to have changed the nature of those errors. Connors and Lunsford ( 1988 ) analyzed over 3000 student papers from across the USA and reported that the most common type of mistake—exceeding all others by approximately 300%—involved incorrectly spelled words. That result was consistent with findings stretching back many decades. Two decades later, however, a follow-up study by Lunsford and Lunsford ( 2008 ) found that the overall rate of writing errors (of all types) had not substantially changed (i.e., 2.45 errors per 100 words in 2008, versus 2.26 and 2.11 errors per 100 words in 1988 and 1917, respectively), but the prevalence of incorrectly spelled words had fallen to 5th place among all error types. In its place, the most common error was one that spellcheck does not typically catch—namely, correctly spelled, but incorrect, words (e.g., homonyms such as brake in place of break ). These errors comprised nearly 14% of all mistakes and occurred not only when writers depend solely on spellcheck (that is, without performing additional manual checks), but also when writers select correctly spelled but inappropriate words from the options provided by spellcheck (relatedly, a corpus analysis by Mitton ( 1987 ) found that over one-quarter of students’ spelling errors consisted of otherwise correctly spelled, but inappropriate, words). These findings reveal that spellcheck and autocorrect, though clearly capable of eliminating typos and other obvious spelling errors, are not foolproof. Further, in some studies, the upper bound of spellcheck efficacy has been about 80% (e.g., MacArthur et al., 1996 ; see also McNaughton et al., 1994 ; Montgomery et al., 2001 ), thus leaving it up to the writer to address the remaining 20% of spelling errors.

Lunsford and Lunsford’s ( 2008 ) study also highlighted several other error types that software-based writing aids commonly miss and can even exacerbate, including the incorrect use of proper nouns, the incorrect capitalization of words (possibly due to auto-capitalization functions), and errors in punctuation, apostrophes, dashes, and quotation marks. It is also important to note that in cases of extreme misspellings, spellcheck and autocorrect may be unable to identify the intended word. Thus, although the widespread use of software-based writing aids has indeed reduced the rate of obvious misspellings and other types of mistakes, those aids do not guarantee appreciably better writing. Rather, writers now need to not only attend to the errors that those aids do not catch, but also to the unique types of errors that such aids may generate. A heavy reliance on spellcheck software may even lull writers into a false sense of security, resulting in less vigilance to errors (e.g., Galletta et al. 2005 ). Although improved programs that integrate contextual data, voice recognition, or machine learning (Greer et al., 2016 ) promise to attain better accuracy in the not-too-distant future, and the use of some types of spellcheck software might even lead to incidental learning of spelling skills (e.g., Lin et al., 2017 ), the research currently available indicates that suggestions to relegate the responsibility for correct spelling entirely to software-based writing aids are misguided.

The widespread use of text messaging, email, and other forms of social media (e.g., Twitter) has also resulted in a growing array of textisms —that is, abbreviations, acronyms, pneumonic devices, and other words that are commonly used in text messages, tweets, and informal emails (e.g., IMHO , plz )—entering into the mainstream vernacular. This trend has led some observers to worry that new modes of communication are causing spelling skills to deteriorate (for discussion, see Kemp et al., 2014 ). Others have even proposed reconceptualizing the importance of correct spelling to accommodate the diversity of textisms and other neologisms (e.g., Trubek, 2012 ). However, the emerging research literature on text messaging and spelling suggests that fears about negative impacts on spelling ability are, thus far, largely overstated. Drouin and Davis ( 2009 ), Kemp ( 2010 ), and Massengill Shaw et al. ( 2007 ) found that the use of textisms was not predictive of spelling ability in adults; similarly, Plester et al. ( 2009 ) found no significant association of textism use with spelling ability in elementary school children. Further, Drouin ( 2011 ) and De Jonge and Kemp ( 2012 ) reported positive and negative correlations, respectively, between the frequency of text messaging use and spelling ability in adults. Overall, these studies suggest that there is not a consistently negative influence of textisms on spelling skills.

In addition, it appears that most writers generally limit their use of textisms to more casual forms of writing. Lunsford and Lunsford ( 2008 ) found no indication of textisms slipping into formal prose in student writing samples, although textisms occasionally appeared in notes or in comments. Similarly, Rosen et al. ( 2010 ) found that young adults commonly report using approximately 8 to 10 textisms daily in their text messages, but when tasked with writing both formal and informal essays, the vast majority do not use any textisms (see also Tagliamonte & Denis, 2008 ). In a nationwide US survey (Lenhart et al., 2008 ), however, over 25% of teenagers admitted to incorporating textisms into their school writing. Overall, it appears that the increased use of new modes of communication and the proliferation of textisms and other casual orthographic forms, while having some influences on writing behavior, have not (as of yet) materially reduced adherence to conventional spelling. Moreover, despite some indications that writing is becoming less formal (e.g., Constantinou et al., 2020 ; Constantinou & Chambers, 2020 ; Lenhart et al., 2008 ), the existence of standard, universally-agreed upon spellings remains a cultural norm that, in the service of clarity, is generally expected in most writing and may be even more important in the digital era (Koerner, 2012 ). That expectation remains the case for traditional written communications (e.g., corporate and other official correspondence), and now also applies in various online venues (e.g., news websites, blog posts, and e-mails).

Evidence of Links Between Spelling, Reading, and Writing Skills

Research on links between spelling, reading, and writing skills provides further insights into the importance of spelling skills, although conflicting evidence complicates interpretation. Footnote 1 First consider reading. Misspellings can make text more difficult to read (e.g., Oelke et al., 2012 ), whereas improvements in spelling ability are associated with enhanced reading skills (for discussion, see Moats, 2005 /2006). A recent meta-analysis of 20 experimental and quasi-experimental K-12 classroom studies (Graham & Santangelo, 2014 ; see also Graham & Hebert, 2010 ) comparing spelling instruction against no instruction or other learning interventions that did not focus directly on spelling (e.g., Kirk & Gillon, 2009 ; Ouellette et al., 2013 ; Rieben et al., 2005 ) found that spelling instruction was associated with improved reading skills. However, the conclusions of the meta-analytic literature on spelling-focused instruction and reading skills have recently been criticized on methodological and interpretative grounds (for discussion, see Bowers, 2020 ; Fletcher et al., 2020 ), which heightens the need for more research to verify the efficacy of such instructional methods. Moderate-to-high correlations of r = 0.5–0.9 between spelling and reading test scores have also been observed across multiple studies (e.g., Ehri, 1987 ; Townsend, 1947 ; for discussions see Graham et al., 2002 ; Rayner et al., 2001 ; Shankweiler & Lundquist, 1992 ), indicating potential links between the two skill domains, but a causal relationship cannot be inferred from such data. It is also more common for skilled readers to be poor spellers than for poor readers to be highly proficient spellers (Bosman & Van Orden, 1997 ; Frith, 1978 ), which implies an asymmetrical relationship between spelling and reading. Overall, there are some indications that spelling skills can impact reading ability, but the precise nature of such impacts and the extent to which instruction in spelling impacts reading ability remain to be fully established.

With respect to writing, poor spelling ability has been hypothesized to impair the composition process by taxing cognitive resources and interfering with higher order skills that are needed to produce well-written prose (Graham, 1999 ). Accordingly, if students have difficulties with spelling, they may then be impaired in developing broader writing skills (Graham et al., 2002 ). A recent meta-analysis of six empirical studies of the effects of spelling instruction on writing ability (e.g., Berninger et al., 2002 ; Graham & Harris, 2005 ; Sussman, 1998 ), however, found that such instruction yielded modest but not statistically significant improvements (Graham & Santangelo, 2014 ). Thus, although spelling skills may impact writing ability, evidence for knock-on effects of spelling instruction on writing skills is not strong (even before taking into account the aforementioned methodological criticisms of such meta-analytic data). Additionally, as with spelling and reading skills, moderate-sized positive correlations between spelling and writing skills of r = 0.4–0.5 have been observed (e.g., Graham et al., 1997 ; Graham, 2000 ; see also Abbott et al., 2010 ; Puranik & AlOtaiba, 2012 ; Rankin et al., 1993 ), but again, those correlations do not necessarily indicate a causal relationship. In summary, although there are indications that spelling skills can influence reading and possibly writing skills, the extent of that influence needs further investigation (see also Graham, 2000 ).

Overall, an abundance of research confirms that spelling remains important in the 21st century. As summarized in Table 2 , that importance stems not just from the potential influence of spelling skills on reading and writing skills, but also from the vital role of spelling in securing employment, in business, and in affecting the perception of writers and their writing. Despite sociocultural, technological, and some attitudinal changes, those characteristics of spelling have not changed substantially in recent years. Moreover, technological innovations have not eliminated the need to learn to spell, nor—outside of texting and other casual modes of communication—have they irrevocably changed the way that words are spelled. Based on these findings, the recent trend towards abandoning or minimizing spelling instruction, which has alarmed some researchers, parents, and observers (e.g., Barker & Puente, 2013 ; Gentry, 2011 , 2017 ; Petersen, 2010 ; Spellbound, 2009 ), appears to be misguided.

Should Spelling Skills Still Be Taught?

Given that spelling skills evidently remain important, the question follows: Should spelling still be taught in schools? That is, should class time still be devoted to spelling instruction, perhaps including the memorization of difficult words, learning spelling rules, charting the etymology of words, or other spelling-focused activities? Historically, elementary school teachers have devoted substantial amounts of class time to spelling. For instance, Graham’s (2008; see also Fresch, 2007 ; Hillerich, 1982 ) nationwide survey of spelling instructional practices in US elementary schools found that instructors spend an average of almost 90 min per week on the subject (which, incidentally, exceeds the 15 min daily amount that has long been recommended in the spelling literature, e.g., E. Horn, 1919 ; Rice, 1897 ). Devoting instructional time to spelling might seem sensible given that English is one of the world’s most irregularly spelled languages (Vangelova, 2015 ). In contrast with other alphabetic languages, such as Italian and Finnish, wherein each letter represents just one sound, the 26 letters of the English alphabet can be used to represent 44 different sounds and create over several hundred letter combinations (Gentry, 2010 ). Moreover, learners typically need to master 6000–12,000 words to write effectively in English (Graham, 2000 ; Hanna et al., 1966 ). As discussed next, however, it is no longer the case that all elementary school teachers devote instructional time specifically to the subject of spelling.

Explicit Versus Incidental Spelling Instruction

Currently, elementary school teachers commonly use either of two primary approaches to teaching spelling (Graham, 1983 , 2008 ): (a) explicit instruction (also known as the spelling-is-taught , formal , or systematic approach), wherein some portion of instructional time is focused specifically on spelling, or (b) incidental instruction (also known as the spelling-is-caught , informal , or naturalistic approach), wherein little-to-no instructional time is specifically used and spelling is instead learned via reading and writing activities (and in some situations, correct spellings are modeled by the instructor and/or discussed in the context of “teachable moments” that arise during those activities; for discussion, see Edelsky, 1990 ). From an instructor’s standpoint, explicit instruction typically entails pre-planned instructional activities wherein spelling is the sole focus (e.g., word study exercises using weekly assigned spelling lists), whereas implicit instruction might involve inserting spelling words into lessons involving other topics (e.g., history and science) and discussing those words in the context of those lessons (for further discussion of different instantiations of the two approaches, see Treiman & Kessler, 2014 ). Footnote 2 Importantly, there are a wide variety of ways in which the explicit and incidental approaches could be implemented (some of which are discussed later in this article). In yet other cases, a combination of the two approaches is used: for instance, when several elementary schools in Lee County, Florida, overhauled their spelling curriculum to eliminate traditional methods, including all spelling tests, school officials suggested that the learning of spelling would be woven throughout all academic subjects, including science and social science units, via a mix of explicit and incidental methods (Fry, 2015 ).

The explicit approach has been, for more than four centuries, the most common way that spelling is taught. It dates at least as far back as the publication of the first known spelling textbook (Coote, 1596 ). The incidental approach has existed for well over a century and gained popularity during the 1970s when prominent psycholinguists (e.g., Chomsky, 1971 ; Zutell, 1978 ) interpreted the finding that children’s “invented spellings” (i.e., incorrectly spelled words that they come up with on their own) eventually give way to more accurate spellings as an indicator that human beings have an innate capacity for developing spelling skills on their own (Read, 1971 ; see also Chomsky, 1971 ), including via statistical learning (Treiman & Kessler, 2014 ). The incidental approach also addressed some instructors’ concerns that traditional spelling instruction is too “siloed” (that is, disconnected from reading and writing activities), which has been a recurring theme in anecdotal reports (e.g., Gill & Scharer, 1996 ). Proponents and detractors of both approaches have debated their relative merits for many decades (Woo, 1997 ). Since the 1970s, however, there has been a noticeable trend towards dropping explicit instruction in favor of incidental instruction, particularly in some US school districts (see Table 1 ), and that trend appears to have accelerated in recent years (e.g., Barker & Puente, 2013 ; Fresch, 2007 , Gentry, 2010 ; Mellon, 2009 ; Murray, 2015 ; Schlagal and Schlagal, 1992 ; Shalash, 2011 ).

The Case for Explicit Spelling Instruction

Graham ( 2000 ) conducted an in-depth review of the research literature addressing explicit versus incidental spelling instruction. Differences across studies in experimental design, outcome assessment, and control for confounding variables complicated interpretation. There was also insufficient evidence to thoroughly evaluate the merits of either approach. Nevertheless, the tentative conclusion was that explicit instruction should not be replaced with incidental methods. Evidence favoring explicit instruction included: (a) reading can yield some incidental learning of spelling, but such learning is modest compared with explicit instruction, and (b) writing yields modest and inconsistent improvements in spelling ability. It was concluded that the incidental instruction should at most supplement explicit instruction (Graham, 2000 ).

More recent reviews of the literature have also affirmed the efficacy of explicit spelling instruction (e.g., Joshi et al., 2008 ; Schlagal, 2002 ; Treiman, 2018 ). For instance, Graham and Santangelo ( 2014 ) meta-analyzed 23 studies that directly compared the explicit and incidental approaches, including studies that were not available for earlier reviews; explicit instruction was reported to increase spelling skills relative to incidental instruction by an effect size of Hedges’ g = 0.43, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.25, 0.60]. Further, explicit instruction was reported to enhance spelling skills over no instruction by g = 0.54, 95% CI [0.39, 0.70], and it was observed that additional explicit instruction led to greater improvements in spelling skills (for related meta-analytic findings involving students with learning difficulties, see Galuschka et al., 2020 ).

Advantages of explicit spelling instruction have also been observed in authentic educational settings. In 1987, the California Board of Education directed all public schools in the state to switch from explicit to incidental or “literature-based” instruction (Woo, 1997 ; see also Krashen, 2002 ). Motivated by the increasing popularity of “holistic” approaches to literacy, that switch served as an early test case for the efficacy of the incidental approach (Gentry & Graham, 2010 ). Spelling disappeared from required textbook lists and schools switched to addressing the subject via reading and writing activities (Woo, 1997 ). By the early 1990s, the switch to incidental instruction had been widely blamed for a statewide drop in student reading scores (Colvin, 1995 ; although for an alternative interpretation, see Krashen, 2002 ), and reports of incorrectly spelled student letters and essays—including a publicized case wherein over two dozen 8th grade students in Middletown, California, produced nearly as many incorrect spellings of the word “vandal” in letters sent to a local newspaper—led to a public outcry (Woo, 1997 ). Subsequently, state officials backtracked, endorsing a back-to-basics approach and the restoration of explicit spelling instruction (a practice that some teachers, frustrated with an approach that they believed was ineffective, had already begun to implement independently). The California state legislature codified that recommendation into law in 1996 (Gentry & Graham, 2010 ; Woo, 1997 ). Afterwards, scores on the spelling portion of the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-9) exhibited incremental year-on-year gains at every assessed grade level, increasing from an average percentile rank of 36–42% in 1998 to 41–55% by 2002 (California Department of Education, 1998 , 1999 , 2000 , 2001 , 2002 ).

Test cases such as the apparent failure of the incidental approach in California reinforce the conclusion that incidental instruction/learning results in poorer spelling skills than does explicit instruction. With school districts in other US states recently making the same switch to incidental instruction that California once attempted, it appears that history is on the verge of repeating itself. Another potential problem with incidental instruction is that assessments for spelling ability are often dropped with that approach, making the efficacy of such instruction difficult to assess and track (Denn, 2019 ).

In 1919, the Speller ’s first author proposed as a first principle of effective spelling instruction, “Do not depend solely on the incidental teaching of spelling” (E. Horn, 1919 , p. 53). In support of that principle, it was argued that any class time that might be saved via incidental instruction would not translate to improved spelling skills, and that even carefully planned methods of supposedly incidental instruction, as opposed to a haphazard but more genuinely incidental approach, would still be less effective than explicit instruction. A century later, that principle appears to have been proven correct. Ultimately, the advantage of explicit over incidental instruction may stem from the fact that it enables teachers to ensure that their students receive training that actually builds spelling proficiency, rather than waiting for, or attempting to engineer, teachable moments.

Are Traditional Approaches to Spelling Instruction Still Valid?

Given the evidence that spelling should be explicitly taught, at least in part, the question follows: What methods of spelling instruction are the most effective? That question has occupied researchers since at least the late 19th century, when Joseph Mayer Rice published the first scientific investigations on the topic (Rice, 1897 ; see also Mann, 1839 ), and has given rise to one of the most extensive research literatures in all of the language arts (Allred, 1977 ). Footnote 3 Although a comprehensive treatment of that research is beyond the scope of this article, a comparison of spelling research and recommendations from the early-to-mid 20th century with more recent developments reveals four important patterns: (a) shifting views about optimal methods of explicit spelling instruction, (b) changes in the definition of spelling skills, (c) discrepancies between research-based recommendations and common educational practices, and (d) recent debates pertaining to the use of spelling tests. Using the Speller as an example of a traditionally popular approach to spelling instruction, those patterns are discussed next.

Revisiting the Horn-Ashbaugh Speller

In 1920, the Speller espoused a curriculum wherein spelling was learned on a daily basis using lists assigned weekly. That approach drew from the available spelling literature and empirical research conducted by the first author (key findings of which had been summarized in a book chapter (E. Horn, 1919 ) published a year prior). As detailed in Table 3 , the Speller had teachers introduce a word list every Monday and then administer a pretest on that list. On Tuesday, students studied and practiced the words that they had missed on the pretest. A diagnostic test on Wednesday measured the progress that had been made, and after students engaged in additional practice on Thursday, another diagnostic test occurred on Friday. That cycle repeated each week with a new word list. Throughout, students were expected to keep a notebook wherein they documented their progress, wrote down challenging spelling words, and described any spelling difficulties that they had experienced in their own writing activities. That notebook bears resemblance to those still used in some primary schools for math and other subjects (e.g., Numeracy Ninjas, 2015 ) and was intended to foster the development of a “spelling conscience” (i.e., a sense of responsibility for correct spelling), pride in one’s spelling ability, and improved motivation to become a better speller (E. Horn & Ashbaugh, 1920 ; see also Hillerich, 1982 ).

Besides introducing a new word list each week, the Speller also called for the periodic review of previously learned spelling words. On each Wednesday and Friday test, not only were the words from that week’s list assessed, but the words from a list that had been assigned 1 month before were assessed as well. Students were supposed to include any of those “older” words that they had missed on such tests in their practice activities. Additionally, difficult words were to be reviewed at the start of each school year. A contemporary view of these activities is that they constituted implementations of distributed practice— that is, learning across multiple sessions spread apart in time (it should also be noted that the Monday–Wednesday–Friday pretesting and posttesting schedule could be classified as another instantiation of distributed practice). The benefit of distributed practice for learning, which is also known as the spacing effect , is now considered to be one of the most robust of all learning phenomena (for a review, see Cepeda et al., 2006 ; for related discussions, see Ebbinghaus, 1885 ; Treiman & Kessler, 2014 ). Distributed or “spaced” practice can improve students’ ability to remember information and apply skills across a wide range of conditions (e.g., Bahrick et al., 1993 ; Rohrer, 2015 ). Hence, the Speller was arguably a pioneer, or at least an early adopter, of one of the most potent learning techniques.

In addition to thrice-weekly diagnostic tests, the Speller had students use practice testing to learn spelling. Specifically, after studying a word and attempting to visualize it, students were directed to cover it, attempt to write it from memory, and then check for correctness (Table 3 ). That process, which was to be repeated three times per word, reflected Horn’s belief that testing with corrective feedback constitutes the “most fruitful single learning activity (per unit of time) that has yet been devised” (E. Horn, 1954 , pp. 17-18). That assertion has since been supported by various research findings over several decades. In fact, it is now well-established among cognitive and educational psychologists that low-stakes practice testing, or retrieval practice , can serve as a more potent “memory modifier” than non-retrieval studying (Bjork, 1975 ), yielding pedagogical benefits in classroom settings (e.g., Agarwal et al., 2014 ; Pan, Cooke, et al., 2019) and across a wide range of materials (i.e., the testing effect ; for reviews, see Pan & Rickard, 2018 ; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006b ; Rowland, 2014 ), including spelling (e.g., Beseler, 1953 ; Christine & Hollingsworth, 1966 ; Cook, 1957 ; Cohen, 1969 ; Jones et al., 2016 ; Louis, 1950 ; Pan et al., 2015 ; Schoephoerster, 1962 ). Thus, in recommending practice testing, the Speller incorporated a second learning technique that is now widely regarded as highly potent (Dunlosky et al., 2013 ; Pashler et al., 2007 ). Later, spelling researchers have also endorsed similar testing procedures, including the self-corrected test and study-copy-cover-compare methods (e.g., Allred, 1966 ; Fitzgerald, 1951 ; Gentry, 2004 ; Gilstrap, 1962 ; Mazzio, 1987 ; Reed, 2012 ; Wallace, 2006 ; Westerman, 1971 ).

Overall, the Speller exemplified an approach to explicit spelling instruction that reflected early 20th century educators’ belief in the central importance of spelling skills and required students to invest time on the subject on a daily basis. It was remarkably prescient in its use of two learning techniques ( distributed practice and retrieval practice ) that are now regarded as evidence-based and highly robust. However, as described next, other aspects of the Speller have since come under heavy criticism, and as a consequence, the textbook is now generally considered to be obsolete.

Contemporary Criticisms of the Speller and Other Traditional Approaches

The Speller ’s curriculum was largely rooted in behaviorist principles and perspectives, much of which are now commonly regarded as outdated (Hodges, 1982 ). For instance, the Speller ’s first author had argued that the acquisition of spelling skills should be regarded as a visual learning task (E. Horn, 1919 ), which was in alignment with common perspectives at the time (e.g., Gates & Chase, 1926 ). Although contemporary researchers still recognize that there are visual components to spelling skills, non-visual components have since been established to be involved as well (Gentry, 2004 ; Rayner et al., 2001 ; Zesiger & de Partz, 1997 ). Accordingly, the Speller ’s heavy reliance on visualization exercises, which reflected a goal of engaging students in repeated “drill periods” to impress words in memory, was based on an incomplete view of the cognitive mechanisms that spelling engages.

In addition, the Speller ’s authors did not anticipate many other research-supported techniques that have since gained wide acceptance. E. Horn ( 1919 , 1954 ) had criticized the study of spelling rules and letter patterns as ineffective due to the apparent irregularity of English spelling, plus dismissed the utility of phonics instruction on the basis of inadequate evidence. Hence, the Speller included no such activities. Yet, many spelling researchers now endorse the study of spelling rules, letter patterns, and phonics given empirical research that such activities are beneficial (e.g., Gentry, 2007 ; Joshi et al., 2008 ; Reed, 2012 ; Treiman, 2018 ). Moreover, the Speller did not include age-specific or grade-level spelling skill benchmarks (e.g., successful use of consonant doubling). The absence of such benchmarks is unsurprising given that most research on the developmental progression of spelling ability—which led to stage models of spelling by Gentry ( 1982 ), Henderson ( 1985 ), Ehri ( 1986 ), Bear and Templeton ( 1998 ), and others—had not yet occurred. Consequently, the Speller did not allow for diagnosing individual students’ spelling skills in any systematic way, such as via categorization of the types of errors committed. Rather, progression of spelling ability was simply reflected in terms of “easier” versus “more difficult” words, with levels of difficulty established via frequency counts of errors from an analysis of letters of correspondence that the Speller ’s authors had conducted (it should however be noted that the use of difficulty-graded lists represents an improvement over more arbitrary lists, which is a practice that persists even today in some schools).

Two staples of the Speller ’s curriculum, namely weekly spelling lists and the Friday spelling test, remain popular today. Fresch ( 2007 ) surveyed US elementary school teachers and found that 84% assign their students to learn a different word list each week in preparation for a posttest (for additional survey data see Graham et al., 2008 ; McNeill & Kirk, 2014 ). Yet, it appears that many teachers no longer emphasize distributed practice or practice testing. Rather, students are commonly told to study each word list on their own in preparation for a single, end-of-week posttest (Simonsen & Gunter, 2001 ), after which the words are no longer revisited. In place of practice testing, non-testing activities such as consulting dictionaries or playing games occur (Fresch, 2007 ; Graham et al., 2008 ). Kilzer ( 1926 ) and other researchers have described that approach—wherein spelling is learned through the study of assigned lists and no testing occurs outside of a final posttest—as the study-test method. Although Sherwin ( 1969 ) and others have long suggested (based on empirical data) that the study-test method is inadequate relative to methods that involve practice testing, it remains popular. That popularity appears to stem from ease-of-implementation: At a bare minimum, all the instructor has to do is assign a list on Monday and proctor a test on Friday, with students otherwise left to learn via their own devices.

In a potentially worrisome development, dissatisfaction with traditional approaches to spelling instruction appears to have been growing among teachers, at least anecdotally, since the 1970s. Chief among such complaints has been the observation that the weekly list-test format appears to yield rapid forgetting and poor transfer of learning. The phrase “Friday test, Monday miss” (Putman, 2017 ; see also Gill & Scharer, 1996 )—wherein students study sufficiently to pass a Friday test, but then appear to have forgotten what they have learned as evidenced by misspellings in later writing activities—encapsulates that phenomenon. It should be emphasized, however, that forgetting is ubiquitous throughout many forms of learning and can occur regardless of the training task (and as emphasized in prominent memory theories, including Bjork and Bjork’s ( 1992 ) New Theory of Disuse , learning can be retained but appear to be inaccessible, if only temporarily). Further, some tasks have been shown to not only boost learning relative to other study activities, but also reduce the rate of forgetting (as in the case of retrieval practice; see Carpenter et al., 2008 ; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006a ). Other complaints target explicit instruction (e.g., the aforementioned claim that the explicit approach results in learning that is too disconnected from reading and writing activities).

Psycholinguists have also faulted traditional approaches to spelling instruction as ineffective at yielding transferrable spelling skills and fostering motivation to spell. For instance, Zutell ( 1978 , p. 848) opined that the weekly spelling list-test format provides “little opportunity for conceptualization,” constitutes “rote memorization,” and ultimately yields “boredom or frustration” and “a lack of carryover from memorizing the words to using them in written products.” Although such complaints most directly reflect the study-test method and not the Speller ’s more intensive curriculum—and appear to partly stem from a combination of opinions on teaching philosophy and anecdotal evidence—the apparent result of these and other complaints has been, over the past several decades, a growing interest in replacing traditional approaches to spelling instruction with updated versions.

Alternative Perspectives on Effective Spelling Instruction

In contrast with the perspectives held by the authors of the Speller and many others of the same era, many contemporary spelling researchers do not believe that the relative difficulty of English spelling compared with other alphabetic languages necessitates “word-by-word memorization.” Supporting evidence for that belief comes from studies showing that most English words have more predictable spellings than previously assumed. In particular, Hanna et al. ( 1966 , see also Hanna and Moore, 1953 , Treiman and Kessler, 2003 , Kreiner et al., 2002 , Ziegler et al., 1997 ) conducted a series of computer analyses of over 17,000 English words and found that approximately half could be spelled using simple sound-letter combinations (i.e., phonics), over one-third were regular except for one sound, and most of the remainder could be derived using etymological information (e.g., having a prefix of Greek origin). After those considerations had been accounted for, only 4% of English spellings could be regarded as unpredictable (Joshi et al., 2008 ). That finding led to suggestions that spelling instruction should concentrate on the regularities of English spelling (e.g., Bowers & Bowers, 2017 ; Moats, 2005 /2006; Treiman, 2018 ), or at least that spelling curricula should be modified to include some instruction on those regularities (e.g., Gentry & Graham, 2010 ). Such instruction might take many different forms. For instance, Joshi et al. ( 2008 ) suggested that spelling instruction should focus on the study of (a) syllable patterns (i.e., open and closed syllables and rules governing their use), (b) morphemes (e.g., prefixes, suffixes, and roots), (c) letter patterns (i.e., rules governing the use of certain letter combinations, such as the letter q always being followed by the letter u ), and especially for older elementary school students, (d) etymology (including words of Greek, Latin, and French origin). Other researchers (e.g., Adoniou, 2014 ; Leipzig, 2000 ; Moats 2005 /2006; Treiman & Kessler, 2014 ) have proposed similar curricula and offered recommendations for effective spelling instruction, including the mixing of explicit and incidental approaches, motivating students to engage in concentrated effort when practicing spelling, and providing students with feedback.

Contemporary researchers have also adopted more expansive and detailed definitions of spelling skills. Specifically, spelling skills no longer simply entail the ability to spell correctly; rather, such skills now include phonological knowledge (i.e., phonemics and phonics), morphological knowledge (e.g., prefixes and suffixes), orthographic knowledge (e.g., phoneme-grapheme relationships), etymological knowledge (i.e., word origins), and visual knowledge (e.g., how letter patterns appear to the eye), many or all of which may develop in stages (Adoniou, 2014 ; Bear & Templeton, 1998 ; Gentry, 1982 ; and Henderson, 1985 ; for detailed discussion of the development of alphabetic knowledge and spelling ability, see Treiman & Kessler, 2014 ). Further, the ability to use a dictionary to check the spellings of words (Graham, 1985 ; Hillerich, 1982 ), use spellcheck programs (Montgomery et al., 2001 ), spell unfamiliar words, and learn the spellings of unfamiliar words found in written text also constitute important spelling skills. In tandem with those definitional changes, the number of ways to learn spelling has also grown (Johnston, 2000 ; Schlagal, 2002 ) and now includes a wide range of commercial spelling programs, spelling textbooks, and a variety of ad hoc techniques invented by teachers and others.

From a contemporary perspective, explicit spelling instruction might involve any of at least three different but non-exclusive approaches, each of which might be implemented in diverse ways (Reed, 2012 ; Simonsen & Gunter, 2001 ). As shown in Table 4 , the most common include the (a) phonemic and (b) morphemic approaches, which focus on the regularities of English spelling (as emphasized by many contemporary spelling researchers), as well as other instructional techniques, such as self-corrected tests, which can be classified under the (c) whole word approach. The phonemic approach focuses on meaningful units of sound and sound-letter correspondences, an example of which involves the study of phonics rules. The morphemic approach involves learning about units of letters that carry meaning, an example of which is the study of morphological rules. The whole word approach involves memorizing the spellings of entire words and especially those that are irregular by at least one sound (Reed, 2012 ). Under that approach (which should not be confused with the “whole language” approach that promotes incidental learning of literacy skills via immersion in reading and writing activities; e.g., Altwerger et al., 1987 ), words are not divided into segments and are instead learned in their entirety (e.g., O’Connor & Padeliadu, 2000 ), such as via self-corrected tests. It should be emphasized that the three approaches summarized here do not necessarily encompass the entirety of contemporary methods of explicit spelling instruction, but rather exemplify widely used methods that many researchers currently endorse. These approaches also represent a marked contrast from the methods espoused in the Speller a century ago, including with respect to the use of distributed practice and retrieval practice.

Research-Supported and Unsupported Instructional Approaches

In the spelling literature, some common implementations of the phonemic, morphemic, and whole word approaches have received empirical support. For instance, a series of meta-analyses involving experimental and quasi-experimental studies have concluded that both the phonemic approach (in the form of phonemic awareness instruction as analyzed by Ehri et al., 2001 , 2003 ) and the morphemic approach (via instructional methods that included an emphasis on morphemes as units of meaning, as analyzed by Goodwin & Ahn, 2013 ; see also Carlisle, 2010 ) can improve spelling skills. Qualitative reviews of at least one implementation of the whole word approach, namely the self-corrected test, have also concluded in favor of its effectiveness (e.g., Simonsen & Gunter, 2001 ). However, the meta-analytic literature on spelling (and reading) instruction may not be as conclusive as has long been believed: Bowers ( 2020 ) reviewed 12 meta-analyses purporting to support the effectiveness of systematic phonics instruction for reading skills (and, where documented, spelling skills; e.g., Ehri et al., 2001 ) and identified flaws in data collection and analysis, including inconsistencies in the implementation of instruction across included studies, comparisons involving heterogenous control conditions, mixing of different outcome measures, inconsistent and unexpectedly high variability in effect sizes across studies, and potential publication bias. These criticisms pose a challenge for the spelling and reading instruction literature as a whole and imply that the efficacy of common implementations of the phonemic, morphemic, and whole word approaches remains to be fully established, despite favorable indications in some peer-reviewed research.

Further complicating matters, other instructional techniques that do not enjoy any evidentiary support have also emerged in recent years. These techniques are often presented in user-friendly lists of activities to attempt. For instance, a list of 18 “creative and interactive” spelling activities recently published by the commercial education website ThoughtCo features such tasks as playing hangman, using spelling words to make a fly swatter, and play-acting spelling words (Morin, 2020 ). Although evidently well-intended, these activities do not directly address any of the aforementioned spelling skills or involve any of the research-supported approaches described above. Rather, such activities appear to have simply been designed to be enjoyable and to expose learners to the letters in words. Although some spelling researchers have endorsed games and other fun activities as a way of promoting interest in spelling, those researchers have often emphasized that such activities are only meant to supplement other forms of instruction (e.g., E. Horn, 1954 ; Graham, 1983 ), a crucial point that many lists omit. Further, references to the “learning styles” myth (i.e., that instruction should be tailored toward students’ preferred mode of learning, such as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic), along with advice to choose activities accordingly, are often included in such lists. Despite popular acceptance of the learning styles myth (for survey data, see Dekker et al., 2012 ), there are no reliable benefits to arranging instruction according to learning styles (Pashler et al., 2008 ; see also Coffield et al., 2004 ; Cuevas, 2015 ; Coffield et al., 2004 , Willingham et al., 2015 ).

The existence and use of instructional techniques of dubious pedagogical value are not a new phenomenon in the spelling literature. Rice ( 1897 ), Cohen ( 1969 ), Graves ( 1977 ), Fitzsimmons and Loomer ( 1977 ), Graham ( 1983 ), Cronnell and Humes ( 1980 ), and Mazzio ( 1987 ) have commented on the disparity between research-supported and common practices. However, the emergence of vastly different approaches to spelling instruction—a trend that generally coincides with growing dissatisfaction with and decline in the use of traditional methods—appears to have led to an unprecedented proliferation of such techniques. Indeed, a Google search conducted for this article using the keyword “spelling activities” yielded approximately 2 million hits, and a partial review of the results revealed that only a portion of those hits involve activities that are grounded in research. Accordingly, when deciding on the manner and method of teaching spelling, today’s instructors would be well-advised to take great care to identify and use research-supported methods, which is admittedly challenging given the plethora of available instructional methods and different levels of evidence regarding the efficacy of each.

Reconsidering the Role of Spelling Tests

Of all the elements that have been common to traditional forms of spelling instruction, spelling tests have been the most directly targeted for extinction in recent years. For instance, of the approximately 250 schools mentioned at the outset of this article, all have eliminated (or been directed to eliminate) spelling tests. The removal of spelling tests has been justified by claims that such tests are useless for learning, uninformative, only reflect “short-term memory,” promote memorization at the expense of transfer, are too stressful or unenjoyable for students, and constitute inauthentic assessments of spelling ability (e.g., Adoniou, 2013 ; BBC News, 2008 ; Carreker, 2010 ; Cheek, 2016 ; Murray, 2015 ; Putman, 2017 ). Although spelling tests still remain dominant—well over three-quarters of primary school teachers report using them (e.g., Fresch, 2007 ; McNeill & Kirk, 2014 )—that trend raises the question: Do tests still deserve a place in spelling instruction? A closer examination of relevant issues and evidence is warranted.

In media reports and other pronouncements regarding the elimination of spelling tests, distinctions between different types of tests are usually unmentioned. Rather, all such tests appear to have been removed indiscriminately. However, despite the stereotypical image of a test as that of a dreaded high-stakes exam, tests can be low-stakes or high-stakes and used for assessment or pedagogical purposes (for reviews, see Roediger & Karpicke, 2006b ; Roediger & Butler, 2011 ). Further, tests can be administered in a variety of formats and taken at different points in the learning process (Benjamin & Pashler, 2015 ; Pan & Sana, 2021 ). Three test types are particularly relevant for spelling instruction: (a) pretests, (b) practice tests, and (c) posttests. Each type has specific purposes, at least one of which is unique. A summary of all three types is presented in Table 5 .

In spelling instruction, the pretest —that is, a typically low-stakes test that occurs before any substantial learning activities have taken place—is intended to measure what students do and do not already know. Such tests may simply involve students attempting to spell words that are dictated aloud, whereas with other implementations, such as a spelling inventory , students’ spelling skills may be assessed according to developmental stage benchmarks. Pretests commonly enable instructors to focus instructional time on content that students have yet to master, as opposed to content that has already been learned. For instance, if a pretest reveals that a student has sufficient mastery of certain morphological rules and not others, then an instructor might engage that student in activities involving the rules that have yet to be learned. In the spelling literature, that “concentrated attack” (Horn & Ashbaugh, 1920 , p. viii) on difficult words or materials is thought to be highly beneficial. In fact, Allred ( 1984 ) and others have attributed the superiority of the test-study-test method (in which a pretest is followed by other learning activities that lead to a posttest) over the study-test method (e.g., Gates, 1931 ; Fitzgerald, 1953 ; Kilzer, 1926 ; Sherwin, 1969 ) to the diagnostic information that pretests provide. Overall, the consensus among many spelling researchers is that pretests yield useful and often critically important information (Gentry, 2007 ; Graham, 1983 ; Harris et al., 2017 ), contrary to claims that spelling tests are uninformative.

Another potential benefit of pretesting involves its capacity to enhance learning itself. Recent research has demonstrated the pretesting or prequestion effect (e.g., Kornell et al., 2009 ; Pan et al., 2019a , b ), in which learners exhibit improved memory for information that is encountered on a pretest, relative to information that is simply studied and not pretested. These studies suggest that taking a pretest can lead to enhanced processing of the correct answers, and possibly because such guessing increases interest in the answers (Kornell & Vaughn, 2016 ; Pan et al., 2020 ). The opportunity to study the correct answers after a pretest is a precondition for learning benefits to manifest (Treiman & Kessler, 2014 ). However, pretesting has not yet been applied to spelling in controlled experiments. Hence, whereas the diagnostic capabilities of pretests for spelling are well-established, the extent to which pretests improve spelling ability directly remains to be investigated.

In spelling curricula, a practice test— that is, low-stakes tests wherein learners engage in retrieval practice after having had an opportunity to study—is intended to enhance (as opposed to measure) learning. As noted earlier, a large body of literature has shown that taking practice tests yields substantial pedagogical benefits (Bjork, 1975 ), including enhanced memory and retention, in some cases, better transfer of learning (Carpenter, 2012 ; Pan & Agarwal, 2018 ; Pan & Rickard, 2018 ). Providing correct answer feedback shortly after the test enhances its benefits (Rowland, 2014 ). A host of spelling researchers, including T. D. Horn ( 1947 ), Cook ( 1957 ), and Cohen ( 1969 ), have shown that practice testing in the form of the self-corrected test and/or the study-copy-cover-compare method yields better memory for the spellings of words than alternative tasks such as segmenting words, studying meanings of words, supplying missing letters, and other methods. Accordingly, many contemporary spelling researchers strongly recommend practice testing as an effective way to learn spelling words (e.g., Harris et al., 2017 ; Gentry, 2011 ; Graham et al., 2008 ; Reed, 2012 ). Practice testing may be the most helpful for words that are irregular for at least one sound, given that rules or other regularities are not fully adequate to guide correct spelling in those cases. It should also be noted that despite complaints about the stressful nature of spelling tests (though more applicable to high-stakes exams), low-stakes practice tests have been shown to reduce test anxiety rather than exacerbate it (e.g., Agarwal et al., 2014 ).

Two recent studies provide further insights into the value of practice testing. Across three experiments conducted in US classrooms, Jones et al. ( 2016 ) had 1st and 2nd grade students first take a pretest and then learn spelling words using self-corrected tests or a method known as rainbow writing . Often appearing on lists of “fun” spelling activities, rainbow writing entails copying words multiple times in different colors. In each experiment, practice testing yielded better ability to spell words on a posttest that occurred 1 day and/or 5 weeks later. Among 1st grade students, the magnitude of pretest-to-posttest improvement from practice testing exceeded that from rainbow writing by over 300%. Additionally, students consistently reported liking testing more than rainbow writing by an approximately three-to-one margin. These results counter the claim that testing only reflects “short-term memory” (when benefits were observed at extended time intervals, as has occurred in prior work) and refute the suggestion that testing is unenjoyable. One possible explanation for students’ preference for practice testing is that the experience of improving across successive tests is intrinsically motivating (for related theorizing see E. Horn & Ashbaugh, 1920 ). In contrast, rainbow writing did not yield consistent improvements. Overall, the results of Jones et al. reinforce the conclusion that practice testing can be a potent method of spelling instruction.

Possible limitations of practice testing are, however, suggested by Dymock and Nicholson ( 2017 ). In their study, 3rd grade students in a New Zealand elementary school learned spelling words across a 10-week period in one of two groups. The “list” group engaged in alphabetizing words, writing them in sentences, and using the study-copy-cover-compare method (i.e., practice testing), whereas the “strategy” group learned spelling rules (e.g., consonant doubling), practiced breaking words into syllables, and learned to identify vowel sounds. On weekly posttests, both groups performed equivalently when asked to spell the words that they had already learned, but the strategy group performed better when asked to spell new words that conformed to the rules that they had previously learned. Although the multi-task design and arguably inequitable access to information during training complicates interpretation (i.e., as the authors note, only the strategy group were directly informed about the rules), Dymock and Nicholson’s results lend credence to the criticism that spelling tests support memorization more than transfer (see also Arra & Aaron, 2001 ). It should be noted, however, that the use of practice tests to learn spelling rules rather than just specific words, which has not been investigated to date, might yield more transferrable learning. Further, in the broader retrieval practice literature, swapping relatively low order practice test formats (e.g., simple cued recall) with higher order formats (e.g., requiring the generation of explanations) and tests with more detailed feedback can yield substantially more transfer (e.g., Hinze et al., 2011; see also Agarwal et al., 2014 , Pan, Hutter, et al., 2019 ), but such tests have also not been investigated in the spelling literature to date.

Finally, the posttest (also called a criterial test or final test) is used in spelling instruction to assess the outcome of instructional activities. As Gentry ( 2011 ) and others have observed (e.g., Dunn, 2019), posttests hold instruction accountable. Without such tests, it is difficult to identify the aspects of spelling skills that students have successfully mastered or not. Posttests may take the form of the traditional Friday spelling test wherein the ability to spell words from an assigned list is assessed (such a test has face validity given that it involves retrieval of a word’s spelling from memory, much as students do during writing). However, critics of traditional approaches to spelling, such as Hilden and Jones ( 2012 ), suggest that posttests should instead assess different components of spelling skills, such as knowledge of specific word features. In either case, posttests are often highly informative as to the state of students’ spelling abilities. An alternative to posttesting involves analyzing students’ writing in their essays and homework; such analyses are arguably the most authentic at measuring spelling ability, but can be more time-consuming and may miss benchmarks that posttests directly target (it should be noted, however, that scoring posttests can also take considerable amounts of time, and particularly when students’ handwriting is poor). Overall, a consensus among many spelling researchers is that posttests are useful to help determine the efficacy of any spelling curricula that is being implemented (Gentry, 2011 ; Wallace, 2006 ; Westwood, 2014 ; see also Allred, 1984 )—be it explicit or incidental, phonemic or morphemic, or otherwise.

Concluding Remarks

A wealth of spelling research provides answers to the questions posed at the outset of this article. First, in the 21st century, spelling does still matter . In fact, in many respects—from the employment sector to perceptions of writers and their writing, and even in online settings—spelling matters at least as much as it has in prior centuries. Second, there is substantial evidence favoring the explicit teaching of spelling. Although the accrual of spelling ability follows a developmental trajectory, and human beings have some capacity for developing spelling proficiency on their own, it is unrealistic to assume that spelling abilities will develop fully in the absence of explicit instruction. Third, some aspects of traditional spelling curricula, such as the use of spelling tests popularized by the Horn-Ashbaugh Speller and other textbooks of the same era, remain valid today, whereas others, such as an exclusive focus on learning individual words rather than patterns common to multiple words, are not.

Importantly, although there are many irregularities in English spelling, the study of the regularities that do exist, which was once derided as ineffective and unimportant, is now recommended by many spelling researchers. Such study might occur via phonemic, morphemic, and other instructional approaches, of which some instantiations enjoy at least some empirical support. Moreover, although the ability to spell is now considered to involve multiple skills ranging from knowledge of spelling patterns to spelling unfamiliar words, the potential exists, based on our examination of the spelling literature, to design curricula that help develop students’ proficiency in all of those constituent skills.

The English language’s Anglo-Saxon roots, as modified by the influence of other languages, such as Greek, Latin, and French, have led to a language that is efficient by some measures, such as number of words needed to express a request or issue a warning, and which is characterized by competing spelling rules and frequent mismatches between spelling and pronunciation. From an efficiency standpoint, children learning English as a first language and adults learning English as a second language might wish that were not the case, but for a variety of reasons, it is unrealistic to think that some government intervention will redo the English language in a way that aligns spelling and pronunciation to the same degree as other alphabetic languages. Noah Webster, in 1806, in his A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language , had the stature to eliminate some inconsistencies in English spelling, which led to some small changes, such as dropping the “u” in color and honor and the final “k” in words such as public and music , but it is difficult to imagine any large-scale changes happening in this era. If correct spelling remains important for all of the reasons we have stressed, then our basic message is that we need to draw on what we know across multiple psychological disciplines to optimize the learning process—that is, taking advantage of research-supported tools and approaches where available, including explicit spelling instruction, practice testing, and psycholinguistic approaches. Also, activities that reflect societal approbation of the importance of spelling, such as the long tradition of spelling bee competitions, which have been uniquely popular in the USA, should be encouraged.

Finally, it should be emphasized that there remains substantially more to be learned about the development and bases of spelling skills and how to optimize spelling instruction. In particular, the plethora of instructional techniques now in existence deserve to be subjected to well-controlled and well-powered experimental studies that support strong causal inference (in a literature that has arguably relied too heavily on small- n studies). More rigorous research designs are needed to provide more definitive evidence, and alternative instructional methods need to be scrutinized. New systematic reviews and meta-analyses of instructional techniques should attempt to avoid the methodological and interpretative limitations that have affected prior such efforts. Last but not least, further research to identify any influences of technological innovations on spelling is definitely warranted. In short, there is still more to understand about spelling, which Noah Webster once described as “the foundation of reading and the greatest ornament of writing” (Webster, 1783 , p. 26), and which an abundance of evidence indicates remains fundamentally important in modern society.

A substantial portion of the research literature on literacy skills focuses on students with learning disabilities or difficulties. This article focuses on evidence from normally developing learners. The interested reader may wish to consult relevant review articles (e.g., Galuschka et al., 2020 ) for further information.

For discussion of yet other approaches to spelling instruction that are not addressed in detail here, such as developmental spelling approaches, see Johnston ( 2000 ) and Schlagal ( 2002 ).

A non-exhaustive list of relevant reviews and related articles includes Allred, 1966 , 1984 ; Cook, 1957 ; Fitzsimmons & Loomer, 1977 ; Graham, 1983 ; E. Horn, 1919 , 1954 ; Joshi et al., 2008 ; Mazzio, 1987 ; Reed, 2012 ; Schalgal, 2001 , 2002 ; Simonsen & Gunter, 2001 ; Treiman, 2018 ; and Wallace, 2006 .

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Pan, S.C., Rickard, T.C. & Bjork, R.A. Does Spelling Still Matter—and If So, How Should It Be Taught? Perspectives from Contemporary and Historical Research. Educ Psychol Rev 33 , 1523–1552 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09611-y

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The Importance of Teaching the Spelling Essay

What is spelling and why it is important to reading and writing, spelling instruction.

To teach spelling, an educator needs to have a clear understanding of what spelling is, what its main regularities are, and how its elements are linked into a single system and others. Only a broad understanding of the general nature of spelling makes it possible for the teacher to accurately set specific tasks for the development of individual spelling topics (Fresch, 2007). It is also important to anticipate the difficulties encountered, understand the causes of various mistakes made by students, and find measures to prevent them.

Spelling is a system of rules for spelling words that have developed historically and are accepted as the norm of written speech. The spelling literacy of a person is a reflection of his or her general and linguistic culture. The foundation of error-free reading, speaking, and writing is laid during the period of spelling training, which is an important component of overall speech and language development (Moats, 2020). Its success is determined not only by spelling knowledge and skills but also by success in reading, grammar, semantics, and speaking. Thus, spelling is mastered as a result of improving and enriching speech.

Spelling is important to reading and writing since it is understood as an integral part of the general language culture of a person. It relies on the ability to quickly detect spelling in the words and their combinations that are intended for writing or have already been written. The development of phonemic awareness and the ability to replace spelling with the corresponding letters lie at the center of literate writing (Templeton & Morris, 1999). Its foundations must be laid in primary school, and this circumstance requires special responsibility from a teacher to instill strong grammar and spelling skills from the first steps of teaching the language.

First of all, spelling instruction should include the alphabetic principle, that is, the understanding of which letters or combinations of letters match which sounds. Patterns are also an important part of teaching and learning spelling. The student listens to an example of reading a specific letter and becomes familiar with a phonetic pattern, for example, CVC one to form short vowels or CVCe / CVVC ones to form long vowels. Since the words are collected in groups, by listening to and reading these groups, a student deduces the patterns of reading (Putman, 2017). For example, after listening and repeating the phonetic patterns dip-hip-lip-nip after the teacher, most students will read the word zip-tip and the like correctly.

Spelling instruction should also include variations based on the origin of a particular word. There are words in the English language in which the familiar combination “ch” conveys other sounds (Putman, 2017). For example, in the words chemistry, technology, and technician, the combination of the letters “ch” must be pronounced [k]. This phenomenon occurs primarily in terms that are derived from the Greek language. In the words that came to English from French, the combination “ch” is spelled [ʃ].

Besides, students should know morphological information, that is, which groups of letters represent which meaning, for example, the meaning of prefixes re-, un-, in-, im-, il-, ir-, a-, non-, dis-, mis-, and others. Morphology is closely related to spelling, therefore its study is associated with the spelling rules (Putman, 2017). The morphological or morphemic principle requires a uniform spelling of morphemes, that is, prefixes, roots, suffixes, and endings.

To develop the reading, writing, and speaking skills in students means working on pronunciation, the meaning of morphemes, words, and phraseological units. It is known that spelling skill is a necessary component of reading and writing. Naturally, spelling lessons are associated with work on the development of students’ speech. Learners must go through the stage of combining the two tasks: expressing their thoughts in writing and observing spelling norms. This combination results in solid spelling skills and general language literacy.

Fresch, M. J. (2007). Teachers’ concerns about spelling instruction: A national survey. Reading Psychology, 28 (1), 301–330. Web.

Moats, C.L. (2020). Teaching reading is rocket science. American Foundation of Teachers, 1-32.

Putman, R. (2017). Using research to make informed decisions about the spelling curriculum. Texas Journal of Literacy Education, 5 (1), 24-30.

Templeton, S., & Morris, D. (1999). Questions teachers ask about spelling. Reading Research Quarterly, 34 (1), 102-112. Web.

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21 Children’s Spelling Development: Theories and Evidence

S. Hélène Deacon, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University

Erin Sparks, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University

• Published: 02 October 2014
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This chapter reviews empirical findings about children’s spelling development, with a focus on alphabetic writing systems. The chapter describes the extent to which research evidence accords with the predictions made by three prominent models of spelling development: phonological, constructivist, and statistical learning. Within this framework, models are evaluated for their ability to both describe children’s spelling across development and to explain developmental change by specifying underlying mechanisms. The review offers insight into the current state of our knowledge of children’s spelling development, gained through years of impressive empirical research. This work has furthered our understanding of children’s developing sensitivity to spelling regularities based on the phonology, morphology, and orthography of words. Yet the review also highlights a clear need for further research in order to clarify points of disagreement between existing models; this pursuit will benefit from spelling research that covers a greater diversity of writing systems.

In the midst of a book on reading, we are delighted to write a chapter on spelling, specifically on its development. Spelling is often considered to be more difficult than reading (e.g., Mommers, 1987 ). One reason, among many, is that spelling requires recall of all of the individual letters in a word in the correct order, rather than recognition based on whole words or parts of words. The study of children’s spelling is of interest for this reason but also because it offers us insight into how children think about the way in which language is represented on the page. Contrary to early ideas about learning to spell (e.g., Hillerich, 1977 ; Horn, 1960 ), there is much more to spelling than rote memorization.

We organize our review around core models of spelling development. These models are important descriptive and explanatory tools that provide broad brushstrokes of what to expect of typical spelling development and also provide rubrics with which to organize the growing body of experimental research. We evaluate the ability of models of spelling development to achieve two important goals, both of which are demanded of any model of development. First, a model must accurately describe children’s behavior at different points in development. In terms of spelling development, this means that it needs to accurately describe children’s spelling from their earliest attempts to the near-perfect transcription of complex words. Second, an effective model must go beyond description to provide explanations for what causes change; effectively, it needs to specify developmental mechanisms. We juxtapose the findings of empirical research against the descriptions and predictions of the most prominent models of spelling development in order to gain insight into the current status of our knowledge of children’s spelling development.

This review, like most models of spelling development, focuses on what we know about children learning to spell in alphabetic writing systems. Certainly, regardless of the written language being learned, developing readers and spellers are faced with the task of working out how the oral language is represented in written form. In the written form of many languages, phonology is an important aspect of this representation, with considerable variation in how information about sound is encoded. Alphabetic writing systems like English use letters to represent phonemes (the smallest units of sound in a language), whereas syllabic writing systems like Bengali use symbols to represent entire syllables. In morphosyllabic writing systems like Chinese, characters represent units of meaning rather than sound, but most characters contain phonetic radicals that often reflect some aspect of the pronunciation of the word. In written languages that reliably map symbols to sounds (e.g., Finnish, which has one-to-one sound-to-letter correspondences), spelling words according to phonological regularities alone may suffice. However, in many languages (e.g., English) the mapping between written symbols and sounds is imperfect, in part because the writing system reflects nonphonological regularities. For example, English spelling includes morphological regularities, reflecting the smallest units of meaning in language; consider the past tense suffix - ed , which is spelled the same way in jumped and played despite different pronunciations (/t/ and /d/, respectively). Spelling also captures orthographic regularities, which in alphabetic writing systems reflect patterns of allowable letter combinations and the contexts in which they occur; for example, English consonants are more likely to appear as doublets at the end of a word (e.g., full ) than at the beginning of a word (e.g., * fful ). Determining how these various regularities are represented in one’s writing system is a major hurdle in learning to read and spell. The study of children’s spellings, especially their errors, provides us with a rare window into their developing thoughts about this connection.

Phonological Perspective

The phonological perspective describes spelling development in terms of children’s increasingly sophisticated ability to map sounds to letters, demonstrating that children do more than just memorize spellings. Under this view, the alphabetic principle is central; children’s biggest challenge when learning to spell in an alphabetic writing system lies in grasping that letters represent the phonemes in speech. Having gained this insight, children apply it to the task of spelling. Although models under this perspective predict that children eventually use other spelling regularities, appreciating letter–sound correspondences is key, an emphasis that is in line with the phonological perspective’s focus on learning to spell in alphabetic writing systems.

The phonological perspective has been advanced in varying forms by several theorists (e.g., Ehri, 1997 , this volume; Frith, 1985 ; Gentry, 1982 ; Henderson, 1985 ). Although their accounts of spelling development differ slightly, the substantive common ground lies in the remarkably similar series of phases or stages through which children are predicted to develop (for consistency, we use the term stages throughout). Initially, children’s spellings are nonphonological and may be characterized as either logographic, in which familiar words are spelled as unanalyzed wholes ( Frith, 1985 ), or as random strings of letters ( Gentry, 1982 ). Fundamentally, these early spellings are argued to lack a systematic connection to the words’ sounds. Children go on to produce phonologically based spellings, first with partial and then with complete phonological representations. In the models’ final stages, children are predicted to master spelling regularities that go beyond phonology to include morphological and orthographic patterns, allowing children to successfully spell complex words ( Ehri, 1997 , this volume; Gentry, 1982 ). As such, models under the phonological perspective attempt to document the progression of spelling abilities from children’s earliest attempts to fully competent spelling. In our review and evaluation, we focus on two models that are representative of the phonological perspective ( Ehri, 1997 ; Gentry, 1982 ).

According to these models, children initially produce spelling attempts that pay no heed to the alphabetic principle. Phonological theories of spelling development recognize these prephonological spellings; Ehri (1997) does so in her prealphabetic stage and Gentry (1982) in his precommunicative stage. As examples, Gentry (1982) describes a 4-year-old child who spelled the English phrase welcome home as ‹SSHIDCA›, and Kessler and colleagues (2013) describe a young child who spelled the Portuguese word bicicleta ‘bicycle’ as ‹ORP›. These examples show an understanding that words should be represented with letters, but critically, the letters chosen are not connected to the words’ sounds.

More rigorous support for the existence of prephonological spellings comes from analyses of spelling produced to dictation by Brazilian children in their first year of preschool (average age of 4 years, 3 months; Kessler, Treiman, & Cardoso-Martins, 2013 ). Children were asked to spell a short list of words. For each of these words, the researchers generated a list of all phonologically plausible spellings—specifically, spellings that represented each phoneme in the word, in the correct order, with a letter or digraph commonly used to spell that sound in Portuguese. Children were given credit for the highest degree of proximity between their own spelling and any one of these phonologically plausible spellings; summing these proximity scores across all items yielded each child’s total phonological spelling score. Next, the researchers compared each child’s phonological spelling score with chance by running simulations that randomly rearranged the child’s own spellings multiple times; this established the likelihood that a child’s performance could have been achieved simply as a result of random spellings. Almost half of the children in the sample (~45%) did not produce phonologically based spellings at a rate greater than would be expected by chance ( Kessler et al., 2013 ; see also Pollo, Kessler, & Treiman, 2009 ). Advocates of the phonological perspective characterize these early, prephonological spellings as “a random stringing together of letters of the alphabet” ( Gentry, 1982 , p. 193). As we will discuss later, it is not always accurate to say that children’s prephonological spellings are entirely random (see Kessler et al., 2013 ). However, it does seem that many young children produce spellings that lack a systematic relationship to the sounds of the words being spelled.

An important shift occurs when children begin to understand the alphabetic principle. At this point, children realize that written spellings represent spoken words (as was the case in their prephonological spellings) and, critically, that particular letters represent sounds within those words. This marks their transition to the partial alphabetic stage ( Ehri, 1997 ) or the semiphonetic stage ( Gentry, 1982 ). As these names suggest, children’s knowledge and application of letter–sound correspondences is burgeoning but not yet complete. Again, Gentry (1982) provides an illustrative example, in which a young child spelled the word telephone as ‹TLEFN›. Here the letters plausibly represent many, but not all, of the word’s sounds.

Some of children’s early phonological spellings draw on their knowledge of letter names. We see this demonstrated in the earlierexample: the letter ‹L›‘s name is pronounced /ε1/, a phoneme sequence that appears in the word telephone . The child has spelled that phoneme sequence using only the letter ‹L›, neglecting to include a letter to represent the vowel. Indeed, both naturalistic and experimental spelling research shows that children in many societies do learn letter names at an early age, and are able to use this knowledge in their early attempts at phonologically-based spelling (see Treiman & Kessler, 2003 for review). For example, beginning spellers of English are more likely to include a vowel in their naturalistic spelling attempts when the vowel sounds the same as a letter name ( Treiman, 1993 ). Similarly, when asked to spell a nonword like /vɑr/ (pronounced to rhyme with jar ), young kindergarteners and first graders frequently produced the spelling ‹VR›, omitting the vowel and using the letter ‹R› to represent the sound sequence /ɑr/. They were less likely to omit the vowel from a word that did not contain a letter name ( Treiman, 1994 ). Similar evidence for the use of letter names in spelling has been found in learners of Hebrew ( Levin, Patel, Margalit, & Barad, 2002 ) and Portuguese ( Pollo, Kessler, & Treiman, 2005 ). These findings corroborate observations from invented spellings that led theorists to suggest that children use letter names in their early, semiphonetic spellings ( Gentry, 1982 ). However, in considering children’s use of letter names in spelling, we need to bear in mind growing evidence that they may not do so as widely as predicted by theory (e.g., Pollo et al., 2005 ; Treiman, 1994 ). Children’s letter-name spellings reflect an emerging, but not yet complete, phonological strategy.

Building on this initial phonological strategy, the phonological perspective argues that children go on to produce spellings that more completely reflect the sounds of a word. Ehri (1997) refers to this as the full alphabetic stage, whereas Gentry (1982) refers to it as the phonetic stage. As an example, at this point in spelling development, the child who previously spelled telephone as ‹TLEFN› now produced ‹TALAFON› ( Gentry, 1982 ), representing each phoneme in the word in a phonologically plausible way. This example is illustrative of a large body of research (e.g., Read, 1975 ) showing that children’s invented spellings are largely efforts to represent the phonological features of words. Phonologically based invented spellings have been documented for children learning to spell in many alphabetic writing systems, including English (e.g., Lombardino, Bedford, Fortier, Carter, & Brandi, 1997 ; Read, 1975 ), Greek ( Porpodas, 2001 ), Swahili ( Alcock & Ngorosho, 2003 ), and Chinese pinyin ( Shen & Bear, 2000 ). Even spellings that at first glance seem quite unconventional often have a clear phonological basis. For example, children’s invented spellings often reflect subtle phonetic distinctions, as when they spell dragon as ‹JRAGON›, classifying the first sound as /͡dʒ/ and spelling it accordingly (e.g., Treiman, 1985 ). Such spellings reflect children’s efforts to map what they know about letters onto what they hear in spoken words. At this stage of development, proponents of the phonological perspective argue that children spell strictly on the basis of sound, overlooking other conventions (e.g., spelling the suffix –ed in jumped phonetically, as in ‹JUPT›; Gentry, 1982 ).

In the final stages of models within the phonological perspective, children move from producing spellings that only reflect phonological principles to producing spellings that acknowledge principles beyond phonology. Gentry (1982) notes this progression in his transitional and correct stages, and Ehri (1997) describes it in her consolidated alphabetic stage. It is at this point that the phonological perspective would first expect morphological and orthographic regularities to be reflected in children’s spelling. As examples, Gentry (1982) notes that correct stage spellers are able to accurately use word structure, including prefixes and suffixes (reflecting morphological regularities), and silent and doubled consonants (reflecting orthographic regularities). Having reached this final stage, children are seen as skilled spellers.

The phonological perspective has had a profound impact on many aspects of our understanding of spelling development for children learning to spell in alphabetic writing systems. Perhaps its most important contribution is the insight that children learning to spell in these writing systems use their understanding of phonology in their spelling attempts, an idea that has influenced both theory and educational practice. As descriptive accounts of spelling development, these phonologically based models have strengths: as noted earlier, once children grasp that letters map onto sounds in words, their invented spellings are quite often phonologically driven. This gives the approach clear face validity. Turning to the models’ explanatory power, learning letter–sound correspondences is a plausible mechanism for children’s spelling development, at least for the transition from prealphabetic spelling to partial and full alphabetic spelling. Indeed, longitudinal evidence points to the important role of letter-sound knowledge in young children’s spelling development during the early school years: Children’s letter-sound knowledge uniquely predicts their subsequent ability to produce phonologically reasonable spellings, and this, in turn, predicts their later conventional spelling accuracy ( Caravolas, Hulme, & Snowling, 2001 ). Furthermore, instruction designed to augment knowledge of letter–sound correspondences seems to promote spelling development: Over the course of their first-grade year, spelling improved at a faster rate among children who received more letter-sound instruction than among those who received less letter-sound instruction ( Foorman, Francis, Novy, & Liberman, 1991 ).

Despite these strengths, models within the phonological perspective focus on somewhat narrow aspects of spelling, limiting their ability to account for the full scope of spelling development. Consider children’s earliest, prephonological spelling attempts. From a strictly phonological standpoint, spellings like ‹SSHIDCA› indeed seem to be random (as suggested by phonological models; Gentry, 1982 ), in that they do not suggest any knowledge of the relationship between letters and sounds. Importantly, though, being nonphonological is not the same thing as being entirely random. As we will review in some detail when discussing the statistical learning perspective, children’s spellings reflect many regularities beyond phonology that are present in the written language to which they have been exposed (e.g., Treiman, Kessler, & Bourassa, 2001 ). Indeed, a key conclusion of the Kessler et al. (2013) study described earlier was that many children’s prephonological spellings reflected statistical patterns in the written language; those children were not merely selecting random letters. This point emphasizes a recurrent issue with the phonological perspective: While it rightly emphasizes phonological factors as important to children’s spelling development, it tends to overlook other factors.

This somewhat restricted focus is also evident when we consider the phonological perspective’s account of later spelling development. For children learning to spell, in many alphabetic writing systems, even mastery of phonological conventions leaves a great deal to be learned; many languages, such as English, have a great number of words for which spellings depend on nonphonological regularities. Ehri and Gentry both acknowledge this in the final stages of their respective models by noting that children begin to apply morphological and orthographic principles. However, in contrast to the careful detail in which these models describe and explain the changing representation of phonology in children’s spelling attempts, they are quite vague about children’s acquisition of other principles. For example, in later spelling development Ehri (1997) describes a general process of consolidation by which, through exposure to conventional spellings, recurring letter patterns come to be recognized and reproduced as unitized chunks. This consolidation is described as applying to both orthographic patterns (e.g., written rime units) and morphological patterns (e.g., suffixes), without differentiating between the two. Although learning letter–sound correspondences may be the mechanism that drives learning alphabetic spelling in early stages of development, it is unlikely to be entirely responsible for children’s learning of morphological or orthographic regularities.

Models within the phonological perspective have made an undeniably important contribution to the study of children’s spelling development. However, it seems clear that there is more to children’s spelling than just phonology. Other models, which we review in the following section, are better able to characterize the nonrandom nature of children’s early spellings and to make clear predictions about children’s learning of nonphonological spelling regularities.

Constructivist Approach to Spelling Development

The constructivist approach has a key strength in positing a mechanism that applies to all domains of children’s learning and development: that of the construction of ideas. In his classic work, Jean Piaget (e.g., 1950 , 1954 ) argued that children actively construct their knowledge by generating and testing hypotheses. Children construct new, more sophisticated rules as they attempt to reconcile their initially relatively simple rules with their observations of the world. Such learning is characterized by stages, in that children’s thinking is dominated by their constructed rule at each stage. Here we review two dominant models that have applied this approach to explaining children’s development in learning to spell in alphabetic writing systems.

Ferreiro’s Universal Hypotheses

Following the Piagetian tradition, Ferreiro was interested in children’s hypotheses about how writing works ( Ferreiro, 1978 ; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982 ). Ferreiro chose the term “writing” to highlight the importance of understanding children’s ideas about how writing works in general, rather than their ideas about individual orthographies. Accordingly, Ferreiro predicted that children would generate hypotheses about how writing works that might not necessarily apply to their specific orthography. For example, Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982) suggested that prereaders believe that a word must involve a minimum number of letters and several different letters in order to be readable; these are the minimum quantity and within-word variation hypotheses, respectively. According to Ferreiro and Teberosky, as children confront more words they gain the insight that spelling variation, in either quantity or variety of letters, does not seem to be connected to the meaning of individual words; this leads children to a phonological approach to spelling. They argue that at this point children move onto the syllabic stage, during which they hypothesize that individual letters represent syllables. Evidence of syllabic spellings has been reported for children learning to spell in alphabetic scripts including Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian ( Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982 ; Nunes Carraher & Rego, 1984 ; Rego, 1999 ). This syllabic approach to spelling is phonological in that children’s hypothesis about writing is that the letters represent sounds; however, children in this stage do not yet appreciate that letters represent a unit of sound smaller than a syllable in the specific writing system that they are learning. Children finally move to an alphabetic approach to spelling in which they map individual letters onto phonemes as a result of their experience that the number of letters in words does not accord to the number of syllables. According to this approach, children’s spelling progresses through a process of testing and rejecting hypotheses.

There is clear value in Ferreiro’s constructivist approach. Perhaps most importantly, it encouraged researchers and educators alike to consider the possibility that children’s early writings are more than random strings of letters unconnected with later spelling development ( Gentry, 1982 ). This theory has also been considered to be universally applicable to children learning to spell any alphabetic writing system ( Ferreiro, Pontecorvo, & Zucchermaglio, 1996 ).

Despite these clear theoretical strengths, the empirical data to support this theory is somewhat lacking, even when tested with children learning Romance languages, with whom it was initially developed. As examples, recent studies have shown that even children who are demonstrably prephonological spellers do not avoid one- and two-letter spellings as often as predicted by the minimum quantity hypothesis. In fact, the number of one- and two-letter spellings created by Portuguese and English children was remarkably similar to the number of times such spellings occur in texts (~20% of the time; Pollo et al., 2009 ). There is more evidence for the within-word variation hypothesis; a recent study showed that Portuguese and English children are less likely to use the same two letters in a row to write a word than would be expected by chance, showing that they do tend to avoid repeating the same letters in their spellings ( Pollo et al., 2009 ). However, Portuguese writers showed a greater such tendency than English writers, reflecting the relative frequency of repeated letters in the two languages ( Pollo et al., 2009 ). It seems that the hypotheses proposed by this model are not universal, and they might be influenced by the input to which children are exposed.

In terms of stages applicable to older children, several studies have failed to find evidence for a syllabic stage in English ( Kamii, Long, Manning, & Manning, 1990 ; Pollo et al., 2009 ) and in Portuguese ( Cardoso-Martins, Corrêa, Lemos, & Napoleão, 2006 ; Pollo et al., 2005 , 2009 ; Treiman, Pollo, Cardoso-Martins, & Kessler, 2013 ). The lack of such evidence in Portuguese is most surprising, given that a syllabic spelling stage had been previously reported for children learning to spell in this language ( Nunes Carraher & Rego, 1984 ; Rego, 1999 ). Indeed, children’s use of syllables in spelling Portuguese was argued to reflect, at least in part, the syllable-based rhythm in Romance languages ( Kamii et al., 1990 ). For example, the presence of a single consonant following the vowel in Romance languages might highlight the prominence of syllables more than in English, where vowels are often followed by multiple consonants ( Blevins, 1995 ). However, in Pollo et al.’s (2009) study, neither Portuguese nor English children categorized as prephonological spellers used more letters to write two-syllable words than they did to write one-syllable words. An alternative possibility is that young children learning to write Romance languages may use two vowels to represent two-syllable words (e.g., Rego, 1999 ) because letter names frequently occur in their language ( Pollo et al., 2005 ; see also Cardoso-Martins & Batista, 2003 ; Treiman & Kessler, 2003 ). However, a recent empirical test of this hypothesis suggests that this is not the case ( Treiman et al., 2013 ). We address this issue in more detail in our discussion of statistical learning models, and we remember that there appears to be little empirical evidence for an early syllabic stage.

To review, it is not clear that the description of children’s writing provided by Ferreiro’s model of spelling development holds up to empirical scrutiny. The experimental evidence for the universal hypotheses is not overwhelming, leading one to consider alternative interpretations of the patterns observed in children’s early spellings. Further, when we think about the many different writing systems in which children could learn to spell, these hypotheses appear far less universal; it is not clear how they could be applied to children learning to spell in nonalphabetic writing systems, such as Japanese and Chinese. In the face of these descriptive challenges, one is also led to be skeptical of the mechanism put forward. Nevertheless, as we will see, the notion of children testing hypotheses can be applied in other ways to describe and explain children’s spelling development.

Nunes and Bryant’s Stage Model

In contrast to Ferreiro’s focus on children’s early understanding of writing, Nunes and Bryant’s model (e.g., Bryant & Nunes, 1998 ; Bryant, Nunes, & Aidinis, 1999 ; Nunes, Bryant, & Bindman, 1997a , 1997b ) focuses on children’s learning about spelling “beyond the first steps” (e.g., Nunes & Bryant, 2009 , p. 1). This model makes predictions about how children learn about regularities beyond phonology, and it has been tested most explicitly in terms of children’s spelling of morphemes.

Applying Piaget’s model of knowledge construction to children’s spelling development in alphabetic writing systems, Nunes and Bryant (2009 ; Nunes et al., 1997a , 1997b ) argued that children’s spelling follows stages. Following an initial period of nonsystematic spellings, children appear to have the hypothesis that spelling represents the sounds in words. After observing the spellings of words through their own reading and spelling attempts, children learning to spell languages such as English and French realize that the spellings of a large number of words deviate from this phonological rule. Consequently, children experiment with exceptions to their rule, specifically by using alternative spellings for sounds. This active experimentation with new spellings leads children to discover that there is a basis for many exception spellings: that spellings are based on morphemes as well as phonemes. According to Nunes and Bryant, children construct this new, and quite advanced, rule through their own reading and writing, rather than as a result of explicit teaching.

Support for this model comes from a longitudinal study of children’s spelling of the past-tense inflection in English ( Nunes et al., 1997b ). The rule distinguishing regular and irregular past-tense verbs in English is relatively simple. If the sound is the same in the root and past-tense form of the verb (as it is in walk and walked ), then the verb is regular and the ending must be spelled with - ed . If the sound is different (as it is in keep and kept ), then the verb is classified as irregular and the ending is spelled phonetically (as - t or - d ). Given that this rule is not taught in schools, if children learn about it they are likely to have constructed this knowledge themselves.

Nunes and Bryant ( Nunes et al., 1997b ) tracked the spelling of past-tense verbs (and control words) by a group of 6-, 7-, and 8-year-old children over the course of almost two years. The authors were able to categorize the majority of children’s spellings into five stages. The first stage is nonphonetic, in which children did not appear to spell the endings of words systematically. This stage is characterized by omissions and nonphonetic spellings. The second stage is phonetic, with sound-based spellings of the endings (e.g., - t for /t/ and - d for /d/). In the third stage, children again spelled word endings inconsistently: this time sometimes with - ed and sometimes phonetically. Critically, children used - ed both correctly (e.g., ‹kissed›) and incorrectly (e.g., ‹feled› and ‹sofed›). Nunes and Bryant argued that children adjusted their rule to accommodate the exception spelling - ed but they did not yet understand the basis of this alternative spelling. In the fourth stage, children restricted - ed to the ends of verbs but used it for both regular and irregular ones. At this point, Nunes and Bryant argued that children understood that - ed is used with past-tense verbs, but did not distinguish between regular and irregular verbs. In the fifth stage, children spelled the endings of both regular and irregular past tense verbs and nonverbs accurately (see also Nunes et al., 1997a ). Nunes and colleagues argued that children at this final stage have a morphological rule to determine the basis for the spelling of - ed .

Support for Nunes and Bryant’s model comes from several aspects of their data. First, 90% of the children could be categorized into stages in the model. Second, the children in the more advanced stages were older and more advanced readers than those in the lower stages. Third, most children moved forward, and not backward, in the stages across the longitudinal study. Accordingly, this model of development captures the progress of the majority of children in mastering the past tense suffix.

Perhaps most compellingly, additional support for Nunes and Bryant’s model comes from studies of children learning to spell other languages. All of these studies investigated the effects of morphology, suffixes in particular, on children’s spellings of word endings. A similar pattern of development has emerged in studies of children’s spelling in Greek ( Bryant, Nunes, & Aidinis, 1999 ; Chliounaki & Bryant, 2007 ), French ( Fayol, Thenevin, Jarousse, & Totereau, 1999 ; Totereau, Thenevin, & Fayol, 1997 ), and Dutch ( Notenboom & Reitsma, 2007 ). In each case, albeit with different designs, these studies find that younger children appear to spell predominantly phonologically, older children use alternative spellings, and children who are older still represent suffixes with reasonable accuracy. Nunes and Bryant interpret this pattern of results as reflecting children’s acquisition of a morphological rule, at least in these studies of suffixes.

Chliounaki and Bryant’s (2007) recent empirical study provides the most direct test of Nunes and Bryant’s hypothesis that experience in reading and spelling drives their construction of a rule. Chliounaki and Bryant evaluated whether children’s success at spelling inflections in real words drives their ability to spell inflections in pseudowords. They examined children’s spelling of word-final vowels in Greek for which there is a morphological basis. For example, word-final /o/ is spelled as ‹o› if the word is a masculine or neuter gender noun or adjective (as in ‹νερο› water) and as ‹ ω › if it is a first-person singular present verb (as in ‹γραω› ‘I write’; Harris & Giannouli, 1999 ). Thus, identifying morphemes in words can allow one to choose between phonologically plausible alternatives. Across two time points in their longitudinal study, Chliounaki and Bryant (2007) found that children’s ability to spell inflections correctly in real words predicted their later ability to spell inflections in pseudowords beyond their earlier ability to spell inflections. This relationship did not emerge in the other direction, nor did it emerge with children’s spelling of other word stems. The authors suggest that “specific learning, thus, may give children the knowledge that they need to construct morphological spelling rules” (p. 1370).

The constructivist approach, as envisioned by Nunes and Bryant, provides a comprehensive description of children’s spellings as they move from predominantly phonological spelling to the accurate representation of complex spelling features, such as suffixes (e.g., Nunes et al., 1997b ). This is one clear advantage of the model: its ability to explain children’s spelling development “beyond the first steps” ( Nunes & Bryant, 2009 , p. 1). There is also beginning evidence for the mechanism by which children master these morphological and orthographic spelling features ( Chliounaki & Bryant, 2007 ), demonstrating that the strengths of the model extend beyond description to prediction. Further, it is compelling that this mechanism is domain-universal, one that children use to construct their knowledge about the world in general (e.g., Piaget, 1950 , 1954 ).

However, some aspects of children’s spellings do not concur with the predictions of this model. Consider, for example, Nunes, Bryant, and Bindman’s (1997b) comprehensive study of children’s spelling of past-tense verbs. The authors argue that there are several key tests of a stage theory. One of these is that it should be possible to classify the vast majority of children into one stage at each testing point. This appears to be the case; the spellings of 90% of the children accorded with predictions of the model, with the spellings of only 10% not doing so. However, Nunes, Bryant, and Bindman also note that a key test of a stage model is that children should move forward and not backward in the stages over time. A significant number of children moved backward in the stages between the testing sessions; as an example, over a quarter of children in the upper two stages moved backward between testing sessions. Certainly, this pattern could be attributable to random error or inconsistency in children’s spellings. However, based on Nunes, Bryant and Bindman’s own criteria, the existence of a substantial number of backsliders casts some doubt on stage-based learning.

As we will see in detail in the next section, data from other researchers suggest that young children’s spellings are influenced by more than what is strictly predicted by the model of Nunes and Bryant. Children’s very early spellings cannot be considered to be random (e.g., Treiman et al. 2001 ). Furthermore, once children’s spellings do become phonological in nature, they are not strictly so; there is widespread evidence that young children’s spellings reflect both morphological and orthographic regularities (e.g., Treiman & Kessler, 2006 ). Recently, Nunes and Bryant (2009) have argued that spelling in each stage of their model might be best described as a bias; for example, young children have many strategies available to them but might initially be biased toward the use of a phonological strategy. Such an argument is consistent with both the evidence that young children’s spelling of suffixes is predominantly phonological (e.g., Gentry, 1982 ) and the evidence that young children’s spellings are also influenced by orthographic and morphological features ( Treiman & Cassar, 1996 ). However, such an interpretation of stages is somewhat at odds with classic interpretations, which focus on qualitative differences, rather than biases, as distinguishing children’s thinking in different stages.

Finally, Nunes and Bryant’s constructivist model predicts that children construct a rule, and yet there is conflicting evidence on this front. These and other researchers have offered good evidence that children achieve accurate spelling of morphemes that can be described with a rule (such as regular past-tense verbs are spelled with - ed ; e.g., Bryant, Nunes, & Snaith, 2000 ). However, as we will see, even in these cases there is clear evidence that children’s and adults’ spellings are influenced by features of the surrounding context (e.g., Kemp & Bryant, 2003 ). Of course, children could rely on rules specific to each phonological or orthographic context that they encounter, but this would not reflect the acquisition of abstract rules considered to be the cornerstone of traditional conceptualizations of rules. These approaches suggest that rules should be abstract such that they should operate independently of surface features (e.g., Anderson, 1993 ). Together, these studies lead us to question the developmental mechanism put forward in this model.

Statistical Learning

Broadly, statistical learning refers to learning about the frequency with which features occur and co-occur. Saffran and her collaborators coined this term in describing their seminal studies of lexicon formation (1996), in which 8-month-old infants used the likelihood of syllable co-occurrence to extract “words” from an artificial language. In less than two decades, the statistical learning approach has transformed the study of child development. Its appeal lies in part in its breadth; it offers a single mechanism that can be applied across a diverse range of domains, such as learning about auditory ( Saffran et al., 1999 ; Saffran et al., 2005 ), visual ( Fiser & Aslin, 2001 , 2002 ), and tactile ( Conway & Christiansen, 2005 ) stimuli (see Perruchet & Pacton, 2006 , for a review). Regardless of the writing system being learned, the statistical learning approach would predict that children’s spellings should reflect the regularities present in the data available to them, possibly leading to sensitivities to a variety of information at the same time. We review here data on the application of this approach to explaining development in children learning to spell in alphabetic writing systems (Pollo, Treiman, & Kessler, 2007).

An early pattern to which young children are exposed repeatedly is their own name. The impact of this increased frequency of exposure is reflected in the success with which children identify letters that occur in their own first name; this pattern has emerged in several different languages, including English ( Treiman & Broderick, 1998 ), Hebrew ( Levin & Aram, 2004 ), and Portuguese ( Pollo et al., 2009 ). And children’s early spellings, which might otherwise appear to be random ( Gentry, 1982 ), appear to include disproportionately more of the letters from their own names ( Bloodgood, 1999 ; Treiman et al., 2001 ).

As children are exposed to an increasing number of letters and words (e.g., Robins, Treiman, & Rosales, 2014 ; Roy-Charland, Saint-Aubin, & Evans, 2007 ), other patterns emerge in their spellings. Recent evidence demonstrates that the influence of letter names on children’s spelling (e.g., Levin et al., 2002 ; Treiman, 1994 ), long cited in support of the phonological perspective, is influenced by the frequency with which letter names appear in words and the relative frequency of individual letters. As an example, words in certain languages such as Portuguese are more likely to contain letter names than words in other languages such as English. Words in Portuguese also contain more vowels than those in English. In Pollo et al.’s study (2005) , 4- to six-year-old English- and Portuguese-speaking children were asked to spell words, all of which had two vowels. Some of the words were pronounced with one vowel letter name and others with two (e.g., /i/ in bunny versus /o/ and /i/ in pony ). Children in both languages used more vowels and were more phonologically accurate in spelling words containing two letter names than those containing one letter name. This demonstrates that children learning to spell both languages use a letter-name strategy, and yet there is also an influence of the statistics present in the learning situation. Portuguese-speaking children were more likely than English-speaking children to use vowels in their spellings, even though the words that the children spelled had the same structure. This difference may reflect the higher rate of occurrence of vowel letter names in words in Portuguese in comparison with English ( Pollo et al., 2005 ). Patterns present in the input appear to influence the spellings of young children.

Children also seem to be sensitive to the frequency with which letters co-occur. As an example, even very young writers of both English and French are sensitive to which letters can occur as doublets and which cannot. Cassar and Treiman (1997) showed that 6-year-old English-speaking children were more likely to choose nonwords as word-like when these nonwords contained allowable doublets over nonallowable doublets, both for vowels (e.g., heek vs. haak ) and consonants (e.g., yill vs. yihh ). Pacton and colleagues reported a similar pattern of findings with French-speaking children ( Pacton, Perruchet, Fayol, & Cleeremans, 2001 ). Similarly, young children’s spellings of vowels are influenced by the surrounding consonants, just as their spellings of consonants are influenced by the adjacent vowels ( Hayes, Treiman, & Kessler, 2006 ; Treiman & Kessler, 2006 ). These patterns could suggest that children are using context-sensitive rules. Regardless of the interpretation, such early sensitivity to orthographic patterns contrasts directly with the predictions of both phonological and constructivist models that predict that children’s early spellings should be dominated by representation of phonology (e.g., Ehri, 1997 ; Frith, 1985 ).

Pacton and colleagues (2001) provided perhaps the most direct test of whether sensitivity to orthographic features can be explained by children’s extraction of abstract, general rules, as suggested by the constructivist approach ( Bryant, Nunes, & Snaith, 2000 ). In French, one could describe consonant doublet regularities with a rule: Doubled consonants only occur in word-medial positions. And indeed, children were more likely to suggest that pseudowords were word-like when they included doublets in the medial position than in the beginning or end positions (e.g., nullor versus nnulor ). Critically, though, children’s performance was affected by the frequency with which specific letters are doubled, a factor that should not impact performance if children rely exclusively on a rule (e.g., Smith, Langston, & Nisbett, 1992 ). Children were more likely to choose pseudowords as word-like if they contained frequently doubled consonants than never doubled consonants (e.g., tummet versus tukket ). Although it is possible that the children might have extracted a rule specifying which consonants double, such a rule would be relatively limited in its scope. Further, it would not adhere to traditional criteria of rule-based learning, one of which is that performance should not be affected by frequency (e.g., Smith et al., 1992 ). It seems then that children’s spellings of orthographic features do not reflect the extraction of a rule, at least not one that applies across a wide range of contexts.

The ability of the statistical learning approach to explain how children learn morphological features of spelling is perhaps its most contentious; it is in this domain that theorists argue that children should rely on rules (e.g., Bryant et al., 2000 ). This rule-based learning is based in part on classic models of morpheme processing treating them as discrete units ( Taft & Forster, 1975 ). In contrast, newer conceptualizations of morphology suggest that morphemes can be described in graded terms; they reflect a statistical co-occurrence of sound, letters, and meaning, or between phonology, orthography, and semantics, respectively ( Seidenberg & Gonnerman, 2000 ). For example, the words teach and teacher are likely to appear close together in text and in texts with similar meanings (according to approaches such as latent semantic analysis; Landauer, Laham, & Foltz, 1998 ), and the overlap of the initial letters ‹teach› and the sound /ti:͡t∫/ along with the meaning ‘instruct’ could lead to the creation of a strong association between the forms teach and teacher . Similarly, children might see - er and frequently hear its pronunciation in combination with the meaning ‘someone who does something.’ These co-occurrences could lead children to use consistent spellings for these units ( teach and - er ). Accordingly, statistical learning might account for learning of these morphological regularities.

One line of evidence supporting the possibility that statistical learning accounts for learning of morphological regularities comes from findings of morphological effects in the spellings of young children. Across several studies, the spellings of children as young as 5 and 6 years of age appear to be influenced by words’ morphological structures (e.g., Turnbull, Deacon, & Kay-Raining Bird, 2011 ); children are more accurate in their spelling of parts of morphemes ( Kemp, 2006 ; Treiman, 1993 ; Treiman & Cassar, 1996 ; Treiman, Cassar, & Zukowski, 1994 ; Treiman & Cassar, 1996 ; Walker & Hauerwas, 2006 ; see also Byrne, 1996 ; Levin & Korat, 1993 ) and whole morphemes ( Deacon & Bryant, 2006 ) than comparable letter patterns that are not morphemes. And a recent study points to impacts of both orthographic and semantic frequency on the emergence of these morphological effects in young children’s spellings. Deacon and Leung (2013) found that young children were more accurate in choosing correct spellings for word-endings that were morphemes than for those that were not specifically when these endings were the frequent - er spelling (e.g., painter vs. corner ), but not the less frequent - or spelling (e.g., actor vs. alligator ). Further, these morphemic effects emerged for – er in derived forms for the 6- and 7-year-old children (e.g., painter versus corner ), but in inflected forms only with the 8- to 9-year-old children (e.g., shorter versus corner ). We attributed this difference in the timing of these morphemic effects’ emergence to semantic frequency; there are far more derived forms than inflected forms in English, based on grade-level counts in children’s books ( Zeno, 1995 ). It seems that even when children’s spellings are argued to be primarily phonological in nature ( Gentry, 1982 ), the spellings reflect morphological regularities in a manner that reflects frequency of exposure to these forms.

A second line of evidence that statistical learning can account for learning of morphological regularities comes from findings that even adult spellers do not rely on simple abstract rules. As we noted earlier, traditional conceptualizations of rules entail that they operate independently of surface features, such as the surrounding letter and sound contexts (e.g., Anderson, 1993 ). If children did rely on such rules, then they would simply spell pseudowords presented as plural with an - s . They do not appear to do so. Kemp and Bryant (2003) showed that child and adult spellers were twice as likely to use - s to spell pseudowords presented as plurals (e.g., “those smees”) when the penultimate sound was a consonant than when it was a long vowel (e.g., preens vs. smees ; see Pacton, Fayol, & Perruchet, 2005, for similar French data). This large variation in performance based on the adjacent sound or letter shows that spellers do not rely on an abstract rule, such as plurals are spelled with - s . Their spellings are, instead, consistent with the input to which they are exposed; - s follows consonants far more frequently than long vowels in English. Certainly there was some sensitivity to the fact that plurals are spelled with - s ; university-educated adults and better-spelling children were more likely to use - s when the long-vowel pseudowords were presented as plurals than as nonplurals (e.g., “those smees” vs. “that smeese”; see also Mitchell, Kemp, & Bryant, 2011 ). However, the effects of the adjacent sound or letter on spelling choices show that this knowledge does not always operate in a manner that adheres to traditional conceptualizations of rules, at least in the paradigm employed in these studies.

Further evidence that surface features affect spelling accuracy comes from studies of both French and Dutch spellers. Contrary to the predictions of traditional conceptualizations of rule-based learning, these studies demonstrate effects of the presence of a homophonous form and of the surrounding semantic and syntactic context (e.g., Hupet, Fayol, & Schelstraete, 1998 ; Largy, Fayol, & Lemaire, 1996 ; Notenboom & Reitsma, 2007 ; Pacton, 2004 ; Sandra, 2010 ; Sandra, Frisson, & Daems, 1999 ). As an example, adults and children are more likely to misspell words that have a homophonous form (e.g., timbre ‘stamp’ can be both a noun and verb, and so has two plural forms: timbres and timbrent ) than those that do not (e.g., nuage ‘cloud’ is only a noun, and so has only one plural form, nuages ; Largy et al., 1996 ). Further, the rate with which these errors occur is influenced by the words that precede the target ( Pacton, 2004 ). As with the effects of the adjacent sound, the influence of features of the surrounding context demonstrates that even adults’ spellings do not appear to reflect the application of an abstract rule that is independent of surface features.

We have reviewed empirical evidence demonstrating that the frequency of exposure to features in the written language impacts children’s spelling. Careful experimental design has brought to light findings of nonrandomness in very young writers’ spellings (e.g., Pollo et al., 2009 ) as well as orthographic and morphological effects in the spellings of children (e.g., Deacon & Leung, 2013 ) whose spelling would be considered by some to be phonologically based (e.g., Gentry, 1982 ). Further, there is evidence of sensitivity to orthographic features, even when a rule can be applied and even by mature writers ( Kemp & Bryant, 2003 ). Across all of these findings, the statistical learning approach claims that children’s and adults’ spellings reflect the patterns in the print to which they are exposed. There is appeal in the single mechanism put forward by statistical learning, applicable across both domains and periods of development. Accordingly, statistical learning offers a parsimonious explanation; in the domain of spelling, statistical learning approaches put forward that children’s spellings reflect regularities present in the input (e.g., Perruchet & Pacton, 2006 ).

As with any approach, there are challenges to explanations offered by statistical learning approaches. First, one cannot dismiss the evidence that children’s spellings do appear, at face value, to be initially largely random and later phonologically driven (e.g., Gentry, 1982 ; Read, 1986 ), as predicted by both the phonological models and Nunes and Bryant’s model. This criticism does not discount the subtle effects of morphological and orthographic features that have emerged (e.g., Treiman & Cassar, 1996 ), and yet there is a real-world validity to these descriptions of children’s early spellings. Second, perhaps the most daunting challenge lies in outlining clear implications for educators. New research begins to outline educational applications; a recent study showed that children are more likely to later develop spelling difficulties if their early spellings accord less rather than more closely with the regularities in the print to which they are exposed ( Kessler et al., 2013 ). Attention to the randomness (or conversely the regularities) in young children’s spellings might then be an indicator of very early progress in learning to spell. And yet beyond this there are few explicit applications of this approach to the educational world, despite clear evidence that children have a great deal to learn (e.g., Nunes et al., 1997b ; see also Bryant, Devine, Ledward, & Nunes, 1997 ). Statistical learning relies on implicit learning, and it is not yet clear how this might be augmented with explicit teaching or even whether it is appropriate to do so. A final challenge for the statistical learning model comes from findings that children’s metalinguistic skills, such as morphological awareness, predict their acquisition of the spellings of specific morphological features (e.g., Nunes et al., 1997b ; but see da Mota, 1996 ). These findings are hard to reconcile with predictions that the primary determinant of performance should be frequency of exposure. Educational implications and the impacts of metalinguistic skills are two areas in which greater clarity is required for the statistical learning approach.

Taken together, the models put forward to date each have strengths and weaknesses in their ability to describe and explain the spelling development of children learning to spell in alphabetic writing systems. The phonological perspective ( Ehri, 1997 ; Gentry, 1982 ) highlights the importance of learning letter-sound regularities at early stages of spelling development. Ferreiro’s (e.g., Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982 ) and Nunes and Bryant’s ( Nunes et al., 1997a ) constructivist models each provide more detailed descriptions of children’s spelling prior to and following this phonological stage, respectively. The statistical learning approach brings a mechanistic explanation to the recently emerging evidence of children’s sensitivity to regularities in their writing system at ages at which their spellings are thought to be either random or phonological. The latter two sets of models suggest domain-general mechanisms that could underlie many aspects of development, including spelling.

And yet, exploring the challenges of each model points to gaps that remain in our current understanding of spelling development. Perhaps the most glaring issue lies in the relatively limited scope of the dominant models of spelling development; all focus on children learning to spell in alphabetic writing systems in which letters are mapped onto phonemes, albeit with variability in the reliability of this mapping. Accordingly, there is a lack of specificity (and, in many cases, clear omission) in the models’ description and prediction of spelling development for children learning to spell in languages that use other types of writing systems. Some of these models can be more easily applied across writing systems than others. For example, the statistical learning approach’s predictions regarding the impact of frequently occurring features on children’s spelling development should apply regardless of the nature of these features. Supporting evidence comes from findings on the frequency of exposure to the spelling of one’s own name; like children learning to write in alphabetic writing systems, 4-year-old Mandarin speaking children are more accurate in spelling the characters in their own name compared with other characters ( Yin & Treiman, 2013 ; but see also Treiman & Yin, 2011 ).

The extent to which other models can be applied to children learning to spell in nonalphabetic writing systems is less clear. For example, the primary mapping in Chinese writing is at the level of the morpheme, rather than the phoneme ( Shu, Chen, Anderson, Wu, & Xuan, 2003 ); as such, predictions of a phonological stage or phase would probably miss the mark for children learning to spell in Chinese. Indeed, that is the case in some of the first evidence emerging on this front. A recent study found that the dominant error type for young children learning to spell in Chinese was the substitution of a synonymous character or the omission of a character altogether (70% to 90% of all errors; Tong, McBride-Chang, Shu, & Wong, 2009 ); such errors are thought to occur at the morphemic level. Phonological errors, such as homophonous spellings of characters, were relatively rare (3% to 4% of all errors; see also Shen & Bear, 2000 ). These few examples highlight the importance of taking cross-linguistic diversity seriously by continuing to test models of spelling development across languages (see Caravolas & Samara, this volume ; Ho, Yau, & Au, 2003 ).

We began this review by noting the many insights to be gained by studying children’s spelling development, and we end by encouraging further empirical study. Not only will such inquiry advance our understanding of spelling development but also it will be necessary to clarify points of disagreement between models. This pursuit will particularly benefit from research across languages, including those that do not use an alphabetic writing system (e.g., Chinese), in order to build on the empirical foundations discussed here and provide key tests of the generalizability of models of spelling development.

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Why Spelling is Important in Writing

• Monday 10 January 2022

In the 21st Century we’ve become accustomed to texting and emailing as part of our everyday lives. We schedule work meetings using our Google Calendar, manage our social life on our phones, and have Zoom calls with relatives who don’t live nearby. And, during the global pandemic, we’re using technology even more than we did before …

But, what about our children? Unfortunately, as schools closed, and lockdowns became the norm, children were having to rely entirely on technology in order to interact with their friends, rather than a mix of online communication and physically meeting. This shift meant that literally overnight, the spoken word was replaced by the written word. As a result, there was greater emphasis on reading, writing and spelling as these skills are necessary when using technology for communication. Reading, writing and spelling reinforce each other, and spelling helps a child see the patterns in language and to understand how words are formed. Children realise that by following the same rules for spelling words, they can apply those rules when reading or writing.

Spelling affects almost every aspect of our daily communication, from how we understand something, to how we communicate our own thoughts and opinions. It’s crucial to understand the  importance of spelling when it comes to our children’s future, because so many things depend on good communication with clarity. Some schools have implemented compulsory spelling tests in order to teach children how to spell properly, earlier in their education. Some people might argue that this puts too much pressure on children, as the education system may seem to be very hard on young learners already. That being said, it’s worth noting the benefits of spelling tests, and how they might protect your child from the chaotic online world of social media. So, let’s look at why spelling tests are a good thing in the modern age, and how they help your child prepare for the future.

The Impact of Emojis and Conversational Skills

We’ve all replied to a WhatsApp message with the occasional thumbs up, or a smiley face, and I’m sure you also remember the times when you wrote little notes to your friend in class (‘Hi, how are you?’), or staying up after school to write your crush a valentine. It was all these simple, everyday experiences that made growing up such a special, and memorable time. If you were born before mobile phones existed, then you probably know what we're talking about.

For those of us who rarely use social media platforms, it’s hard to imagine what it feels like to constantly have the online buzz around you. To have the ping of notifications on your phone every two minutes, and to feel anxious when you don’t have as many friends on Facebook as someone else; but that’s already heavily reported by the media. In my opinion, what’s lacking in mainstream media is the research on how technology is actually affecting our early learners, the children who have just started school and are beginning to learn to read and write. Those are the young learners we should focus our attention on.

These children are growing up in a time of emojis, and spelling doesn't play as much of a role in that world as it used to. As young adults, we can experience many normal life events; for example, applying for a job, completing a questionnaire and filling in official documentation. Much of the paperwork we need to fill out in our adult lives, involves a basic knowledge of spelling, and grammar.

That’s why the introduction of spelling tests is a great way to keep our children practising, and learning to spell correctly. Tests, as much as they can be tedious, help our brains remember knowledge that is very useful later in life. So, even though your 5-year-old child isn’t going to apply to a graduate programme any time soon, you want to make sure he or she has the  best possible chance of succeeding in their adult years. Spelling is a BIG part of making sure they achieve everything they want.

How Do Children Learn to Spell?

So, that brings us to the question, ‘ How do children learn to spell?’.  It might seem simple to us now, but as a child, the process of learning to spell is actually incredibly complex , which is why we need to ensure our children have the right resources to help them on their learning journey.

The best way children observe information is within their surroundings. For example, they take  in everything they see and hear. A vibrant environment for your child is a good place to start – you could include posters, books and toys – anything that can give context to a word, or letter. Another great way for children to learn spelling is through memory. Although this really depends on what sort of learner your child is. Some children react well to repetition, and others prefer interactive forms of learning. It’s important to get to know what works best for your child.

If your child responds better to instruction and rules, telling them exactly how it works, step-by-step might also improve their spelling; for example, speech sounds, letters, context, and spelling patterns. All of which are great for helping your child understand why, and when we need different spelling.

Even though nowadays we have auto-correct, and spell-checker programs, software and apps to assist in correcting spelling in our work, it’s still a valuable life skill to teach your child. You might be thinking, is it really necessary when there’s so much online to help them with spelling? The answer is, yes. As much as the online world dictates most of our lives, that doesn’t mean that ‘old school’ skills, and knowledge won’t come into use at some point in their lives. As I mentioned earlier, what happens when your child leaves university and wants to apply for a graduate programme, and they are asked to complete a test as part of the application? A test could involve some written exercises without a computer, so they would have to rely on what they have learnt previously.

It’s vital to remember that phones, laptops, and other forms of technology are not reliable in every situation. Also, there may be times that you may not have access to technology and you might need to spell. That’s why spelling is important in writing.

How YOU Can Help Your Child Become a Spelling Wizard!

Thankfully, there’s LOTS you can do as a parent, or teacher, to help children learn spelling. The main thing is practice …  

We all know that kids love to play games, so why not play spelling games with them? You can try some classics like, Hangman, Boggle ® , and Scrabble ® . There are also lots of spelling apps that you can play on the sofa after dinner, such as Word  Wizard for Kids, or Word Wagon ... there are so many tools to help.

As well as these, Prim-Ed have a fantastic spelling workbook series that provides some wonderful exercises to do with your child to help them improve, and master the power of spelling.  

Now that we’ve suggested some of the positive ways to help your child with spelling, here are some common mistakes to look out for:

• Using the wrong consonant (e.g. kake, instead of cake)
• Leaving an ‘e’ when it should be dropped (e.g. rideing, instead of riding)
• Reverse spelling (e.g. suop, instead of soup)
• Forgetting rules like (e.g. i before e except after c; recieve, instead of receive)

You can place Post-it ® notes around the room to remind your child of spellings, rules, and common mistakes. Anything that helps reinforce the learning process will be of benefit.  

All that being said, learning is first and foremost, about enjoyment. We want to make sure spelling is fun and playful, as well as well- informed. But, who says spelling doesn’t need to be fun?  Simply watching a movie will get your child excited about learning to spell. A great one is, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, theatrical trailer - YouTube . It’s guaranteed to get your child enthusiastic about their next spelling test!

Hopefully, this has proved that spelling is more important than ever in writing, and that we don’t need to stop using emojis. We can enjoy the benefits of technology, but remain mindful of the consequences it may have on education. Happy Spelling!

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The Importance of Spelling

Spelling is important for three reasons:

• Communication: Spelling is a critical component of communication
• Literacy:  Spelling and reading skills are closely related and help develop overall literacy
• Employment:  Spelling quality has a direct impact on employment opportunities

While autocorrect and spelling software has become a given in our lives, the importance of spelling hasn’t lessened – it’s actually never been more important.

If you’re looking for an online spelling resource to use in class, our literacy program Reading Eggs has over over 300 spelling lessons .

Why is spelling still so important?

As spelling and literacy have reached their apogee across all of human history, so too has the demands on the quality of delivery.

Poor spelling can interfere with:

Our basic ability to communicate

85% of people around the world are connected online and receive email, while 62% of them communicate through social media. The spectrum of risk can be negligible, like sending someone to the wrong address, to lethal, if sending someone instructions on prescriptions.

Employment opportunities

Online job hunting and posting is growing exponentially, and the first impression most employees will have with their employees is their resume or CV. However, where a peron might be forgiving with a misspelling, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) which scan applications for keywords lack any remorse.

It doesn’t end at professional documents either – employers are increasingly to surveying applicants personal social media to check for suitability.

Perceived trustworthiness

Tolerance for typos is low. On printed materials, it makes the producer look careless or cheap, while online it’s become a signal of a phishing or scamming attempt.

Spelling and the development of communication skills

Communication skills are essential for children to grow and interact successfully with the world. Communication usually begins with simple body language, gestures and vocalisations. As children progress to verbal communication, they naturally develop an early understanding of their native language.

Making the connection between verbal expression and written communication is much more complex, and requires a combination of observation and formal instruction. The foundational skills for successful written communication are learnt at this time, such as the ability to identify letters by sight, and build associations between written patterns and vocal expressions.

Boost your students’ spelling confidence with these 6 spelling strategies 

Spelling and its role in literacy development.

Spelling, the art of correctly assembling words from their letters, is one of the essential components of successful writing. Being confident at spelling leads to confidence in all aspects of literacy. The ability to recognise the links between word of the same origin and understanding word relationships has been proven to aid comprehension skills.

Research has found that spelling, reading, writing and comprehension skills are all closely linked. A research study conducted by L.C. Ehri for the Scientific Study of Reading found that spelling instruction improves reading ability, as it builds a learner’s knowledge of the alphabetic system as it is used in reading.

Teaching young spellers the strategies, rules and concepts to grow their spelling and vocabulary knowledge benefits them in all aspects of their learning, as well as in their everyday life.

Learners who feel confident with letters and word patterns are able to read and comprehend more complex texts. They also have the necessary language tools to better convey their own ideas through both written and verbal communication.

The relationship between written words and sounds can seem arbitrary and difficult for many learners. But building a strong foundational knowledge of the links between forms, letters, sounds and meaning is essential for students to become confident communicators.

Besides spelling lessons, Reading Eggs is also packed with teaching resources, phonics lessons and games!

You might like....

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Succeeding in School: Essential Features of Literacy Development

Educators and parents understand that reading skills lay the foundation for academic success. Students also need to have strong communication skills to do well in school. Students learn by reading books and other texts, but they also learn by listening to knowledgeable speakers, participating in discussions, and writing reports and essays on important topics.

From the beginning of school, students should be taught different ways of using language to help them learn and communicate about academic content. This means reading and listening with understanding. It means using facts and evidence to reason and build strong verbal and written arguments. This brief discusses two areas of literacy development that students must learn so that they can do well in school: foundational reading skills and academic language .

Foundational Reading Skills

Learning to read in English (and in other alphabetic languages such as Spanish) requires teaching students how the alphabetic system works. Three issues are critical:

• Understanding that each word when spoken consists of smaller units of sounds, and it is important to learn to hear and identify these discrete sounds. For example, there are three sounds in the word “sat.” Saying “sat” without the s sound would be what word? What word would it be if we put an m sound at the beginning of the word “at”?
• Learning that the letters of the alphabet are symbols for these sounds. Together, the words “sat” and “mat,” use four different letters, and each letter makes a different sound.
• Knowing that the purpose of reading is to understand the text, and understanding requires concentration and practice. The words “sat” and “mat” have meaning. When they are used with other words to make a sentence, that sentence also has meaning. “He sat on a mat” has meaning.

With teaching, time, and practice, most students become fluent readers and understand what they read. In other words, they develop foundational reading skills. However, many students have difficulty in spite of these efforts. For these students, instruction and practice should be targeted to address their difficulties as early as possible.

Academic Language

Some words rarely used in everyday conversations are commonly used in academic settings. Learning the meaning of academic vocabulary is essential to understanding and applying new content. Some academic words (e.g., “democracy”) and phrases (e.g., “democracy in action”) should be studied intensely over time. In this way, students learn new vocabulary thoroughly and experience how crucial word and concept knowledge is to learning. Students must also learn that the way language is used in school settings is different from the way it is used in everyday conversations. This awareness includes learning how different subjects such as science, social studies, and mathematics frequently have their own conventions for communicating academic content.

Learning academic language also takes explicit teaching, time, and practice. Students should be given instruction and feedback on using academic language across school subjects.  They should also be given plenty of time to talk and write about what they are learning within each of these subjects.

Teaching students foundational reading skills and academic language should be connected. Progress in reading and progress in academic language will influence each other. Knowing how to achieve this balance is part of effective teaching. Effective teaching also requires knowing when and how to make adjustments for students who are struggling because of dyslexia or other literacy -related disabilities and difficulties.

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Suggested Citation

Baker, S.K., Turtura, J., & Gearin, B. (2017). Succeeding in school: Essential features of literacy development. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Center on Improving Literacy. Retrieved from http://improvingliteracy.org

Baker, S.K., Lesaux, N., Jayanthi, M., Dimino, J., Proctor, C. P., Morris, J., Gersten, R., Haymond, K., Kieffer, M. J., Linan-Thompson, S., & Newman-Gonchar, R. (2014). Teaching academic content and literacy to English learners in elementary and middle school (NCEE 2014-4012). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from the NCEE website: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications_reviews.aspx .

Foorman, B., Beyler, N., Borradaile, K., Coyne, M., Denton, C. A., Dimino, J., Furgeson, J., Hayes, L., Henke, J., Justice, L., Keating, B., Lewis, W., Sattar, S., Streke, A., Wagner, R., & Wissel, S. (2016). Foundational skills to support reading for understanding in kindergarten through 3rd grade (NCEE 2016-4008). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from the NCEE website: http://whatworks.ed.gov .

Adams, M.J. Thinking and learning about print. (1994). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Snow, C.E., Burns, M.S., & Griffin, P. (eds.) (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Reading skills provide the foundation for academic success. From the beginning of school, students should be taught different ways of using language to help them learn and communicate about academic content. This brief discusses two areas of literacy development that students must learn so that they can do well in school: foundational reading skills and academic language .

Related Resources

More on beginning reading.

• A Common Family Factor Underlying Language Difficulties and Internalizing Problems: Findings From a Population-Based Sibling Study
• Coaching Steps for Families
• Comparison of Reading Growth Among Students With Severe Reading Deficits Who Received Intervention to Typically Achieving Students and Students Receiving Special Education
• Fluency with Text
• Four Steps to Building Fluency with Text

The research reported here is funded by awards to the National Center on Improving Literacy from the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, in partnership with the Office of Special Education Programs (Award #: S283D160003). The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of OESE, OSEP, or the U.S. Department of Education. Copyright © 2024 National Center on Improving Literacy. https://improvingliteracy.org