How do children gain the knowledge to become good spellers? We now have quite a lot of research to help us support children at each stage in their development. Much information is available about how spelling and reading are linked and the most promising kinds of teacher intervention are suggested in O’Sullivan and Thomas’ Understanding Spelling (2000). Another book which gives practical help for spelling at Key Stages 1 and 2 is Norma Mudd’s Effective Spelling (1994).
The research of Margaret Peters, set out in her book Spelling: Caught or Taught, was one of the first systematic accounts of children’s spelling development. The book was first published in 1967; she wrote another edition in 1985 which contains a similar message to the first: that teachers need to intervene to help individual children develop their spelling competence and that visual strategies are needed as well as those based on sound. Phonics helps us with regular words but we need visual strategies to help us learn the exceptions. For many years teachers have referred to the magic ‘e’, the split digraph which lengthens the vowel. Some children have a strongly developed visual memory and remember the ‘look’ of words easily and this helps them benefit from their reading when it comes to spelling. We have to help children whose visual memory is less developed to acquire useful strategies. The National Literacy Strategy in its renewed form, 2006, requires us to link spelling to phonics work as well as developing the visual strategies.
Richard Gentry’s work and that of others indicates that spelling develops in stages. Children begin by writing something that creates the flow of adult-type writing. Then they realise there are different letter shapes – in the precommunicative stage. When they begin for example to use ‘r’ for ‘are’ we know they have arrived at the prephonetic stage. The next stage is the phonetic stage where there is better control over sound/ symbol relationships. Visual strategies strengthen at the ‘transitional’ stage. Individuals may not go neatly through the stages.
If we want children to use their minds to explore the spelling system we have to allow them to risk sometimes being wrong.
Gentry, Richard (1982) ‘An analysis of developmental spelling in GNYS AT WRK’. Reading Teacher, 36: 192–200.
Mudd, Norma (1994) Effective Spelling: a practical guide for teachers London: Hodder & Stoughton.
O’Sullivan, Olivia and Thomas, Anne (2000) Understanding Spelling London: The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education.
Peters, Margaret (1985 edition) Spelling: Caught or Taught: A New Look London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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