Hi Christine,
Thanks for bringing up such an important topic! You are right: traditional spelling lists typically include a hodgepodge of words for students to be expected to spell. When those lists include spelling patterns that haven’t been introduced in explicit and systematic instruction, students are often forced to memorize the spellings. Not only is this practice inefficient and not generalizable, it also often leaves students forgetting how to spell the studied word soon after the quiz has been completed. Alternatively, when students are taught to encode words (using their ability to segment a word into individual speech sounds and apply the appropriate letter correspondences to those sounds) they can generalize these skills to countless words, and the frequent practice of these skills across many applicable words supports long-term retention and application.
It’s no surprise that spelling is difficult for many students, given the demands of the skill. But a closer inspection of the types of spelling errors students are demonstrating can help educators determine how best to support their development. One of the first considerations teachers should informally assess is if the student is attempting to spell each and every sound in the word- even if incorrectly. For example, a student may misspell the word bunk as <buk> or strip as <stip>, in both cases omitting a letter from a consonant blend. In this case, we would want to dedicate instructional time to helping the student’s phonemic awareness development- ensuring they are able to segment all of the sounds (or phonemes) of orally presented words, especially those with consonant blends. This foundational skill is critical for students’ spelling progression.
Students may also misrepresent speech sounds with inappropriate letters when attempting to spell. For example, a student might spell big as <bik> or wish as <wis>. These would still be examples of potential phonemic awareness difficulties, but this time the student is demonstrating difficulty discriminating between similar-sounding phonemes (e.g., /g/ vs. /k/ or /sh/ vs. /s/). Again, the student’s spelling is unlikely to improve without intervention targeting this underlying deficiency of accurately segmenting and discriminating each phoneme in the targeted word. At times, it may not be immediately clear if the student was unable to identify the appropriate sound, or if they applied an inappropriate letter to the correctly identified sound. For example, if the above student had spelled wish as <wich>, it may not be immediately clear if the error was due to a difficulty differentiating between the phonemes /ch/ and /sh/ or misremembering the appropriate digraph spelling, especially if both were recently introduced. Other misspellings that may reflect insufficient learning of sound-letter correspondences (rather than difficulty with phonemic awareness) might be <cip> for sip, or <brd> for bird.
Of course, because of English’s deep orthography, segmenting skills and phonics knowledge will not be sufficient in teaching students to spell all words. Because more than one grapheme can be used to spell a phoneme, a student won’t necessarily know which letter(s) to use to spell a word, even if they have segmented it correctly and have the appropriate phonics knowledge. For example, if a student is not familiar with the correct spelling of the word cheap, they will not know if they should use <ea>, <ee>, or <e_e> to represent the long vowel sound in the word, due to the multiple possibilities. Students can be given guidance on the most frequently used graphemes, but ultimately this orthographic layer of knowledge comes from reading and correctly spelling this word multiple times. This is because students must learn to use their phonics knowledge of the expected or reliable correspondences (in this case, <ch> and <p>) with word-specific knowledge for the ambiguous portion of the word (i.e., the vowel sound in the case of cheap) to spell the entire word correctly. This two-fold approach is different from having students memorize the whole word. A similar process is used when students learn to spell irregular words. Educators should be mindful of the fact that students can vary widely in how many exposures of a word are necessary to automatize the correct spelling, whether the word has an ambiguous spelling (e.g., cheap) or an irregular spelling (e.g., does).
The final layer of knowledge to consider when analyzing a student’s spelling is morphology. Part of what contributes to English’s deep orthography is that it is morphophonemic- morphology influences how words are spelled in addition to the sounds in words. Knowledge of how our language system works can support spelling by drawing on familiarity with morphologically related words (e.g., sign/signal, two/twin), and it is imperative in appropriately using affixes. Consider, for example, the knowledge that a student must consider when using the <ed> suffix. To avoid misspellings such as <jumpt>, <opend>, or <restid>, a student would need to be familiar with the past tense verb marker, appropriately identify the base words as verbs to correctly spell the word using the past tense. Not only that, but the student must also understand that this spelling applies only to regular past tense verbs. For example, swept and slept are past tense verbs that end in the same phonemes as jumped (/pt/), but are spelled phonetically due to their irregular verb ending. Students demonstrating these types of errors would not benefit from further instruction targeting phonemic awareness or phonics, as their misspellings already indicate proficiency in these domains.
Analyzing student spelling can be a very powerful window into a student’s understanding of how our writing system works, and thus how best to target specific areas of weakness. Wonderfully, this can be done for free without any special measures or programs. While the necessary time one would need to devote to this may not make it a practical step for classroom teachers to consider for all students, I hope that it gives you a way to move forward with the students that you have on your caseload!
