BACK TO SCHOOL – Spelling

“My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.” (Winnie the Pooh)

Children’s spelling develops through several predictable stages. Some children progress comparatively slowly through these stages; with many unable to develop their spelling skills beyond the phonetic level.

Learning to spell is harder than learning to read. Reading is a recognition task, but spelling necessitates accurate recall of the word. When a child is reading, the words stay in front of them and they are able to use different strategies to decode, for example:-

• They can sound a word out phonetically – c-a-t. 
• Look to see if the word resembles others they know – l-i-g-h-t / s-i-g-h-t / m-i-g-h-t / r-i-g-h-t.
• Or use the context of the passage to guess the word – Mum drove the car into the ga – – – –

However, when the child tries to spell a word, they have to recall the word from memory. The child may rely on their auditory memory and spell the word phonetically, but then be unable to tell whether the word ‘looks right’ or not, for example: wos / was, sed / said, wot / what. 

Or they may rely on their visual memory and attempt to recreate the shape of the word, for example: oen for car, huaeknn for teacher, but then be unable to make sense of their spelling phonetically.

There are many reasons for children to experience a difficulty with spelling.

They may have weak auditory processing and be unable to hear the different sounds within a word.

They may have a poor auditory memory and be unable to remember the sounds within a word.

They may experience sequencing problems and be unable to order the sounds within a word: carpark becoming parcark.

Or they may have a weak working memory and, although they can identify the sound, are unable to remember the letters that represents that sound in spelling.

Spelling errors will include: – 

• Words that are spelt differently in the same piece of work: skule, skool, scule. 
• Words that are run together: halfanhour / half an hour.
• Words with too many or too few syllables: sundedly / suddenly, choclate / chocolate. 
• Letters within words are incorrectly sequenced: siad / said, gril / girl, was / saw.
• Capitals and small letters are used randomly in spellings, because the child is uncertain of which is which.

The child is able to learn spellings for a weekly test, but will not use the correct spelling when they have to multitask and think about: presentation, content, time constraints, handwriting and so on.

It is galling for a child to be accused of being lazy, careless or slapdash when they have a genuine spelling difficulty. While spelling is important, the content of a child’s writing is more important. There are many specialist programmes that help children with spelling difficulties improve their competency, but once a child has reached a level where they can spell phonetically, it would be productive, (and kinder), to help them to also develop their technological skill, for example, through the use of voice recognition or text to speech software.