Teaching Spelling

The complex history of the English language means that its spelling system is tricky to learn. Even as this is written and read, spelling is slowly shifting and changing. In our techno-age, innovations like text-messaging are likely to have their impact on the spelling system which is seen as 'standard'. More research and more observation of teachers teaching spelling now suggest that the key to helping young writers get to grips with spelling conventions is to see it as part of language study as a whole.

The 'traditional' view of teaching spelling was that all you need to do is to give children lists of words to learn and then to test them. But it isn't as easy as that. If it were, every adult in the land would be able to spell conventionally. They can't - and this is part of the basis for debate and opinion about teaching and learning spelling. However, many adults know that if they are unsure of how to spell something they can ask someone else, use the computer spell checker, look up a word in a dictionary.

Learning to spell through learning to write raises issues about early instruction in writing, reading and spelling - particularly since the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy - teaching spelling has been associated mostly with teaching reading. Concerns about opportunities for sustained writing become even more significant if spelling is best developed through writing experiments and experience.

This finding emphasises the integral nature of language study; if teaching spelling is largely dealt with in the context of reading, crucial opportunities for further development - by the association of what is read with what is written - may be missed. The CLPE research also set out to examine the role of analogy in children's spelling development. The findings indicated that children who were successful spellers spontaneously used analogy in a range of different ways: rhyming patterns and visual letter patterns as well as actively seeking to identify grammatical regularities such as 'ed' endings.

Ask any group of adults and the same kind of variety of approaches - auditory, visual, metaphoric, kinaesthetic, verbal/symbolic - will emerge. This strongly suggests that no single approach to teaching spelling will cater for all learners. The research also signals the importance of helping pupils develop individual strategies for tackling spelling very early in their schooling. Since the CLPE research also emphasised that children tend towards the visual or the auditory at first, then all children need the chance to experience a range of ways that might help them to make spelling stick.

Since children's creative experiments with individual words are related to their growing understanding of the language system as a whole, teaching spelling cannot be divorced from regular experience of writing. Claire Saunders realised the importance of a writing-based approach when she and her colleagues began to look closely at spelling. The teachers saw changes in teaching spelling as changes in values - their own and the pupils'. They found a tension between the body of knowledge in the termly details of the word level sections of the NL Framework and their desire to integrate spelling into the teaching of writing as a whole.