It was the construction of the first dictionaries by Dr. Johnson (1755) and later Noah Webster that set correct spellings 'in stone'. Before the 18th century people spelt phonetically, 'by ear'. They would often spell the same word in different ways in the same piece of writing and this was considered perfectly correct (you can see such variable spelling in Shakespeare's original scripts, for example). If Johnson had standardized the spelling for phonemes at the same time that he standardized the spelling for words, and in doing so created a 'transparent' (one spelling for each sound in the language) English alphabet, we would not have the difficulties with English literacy that we do today.

It has been assumed, wrongly, that spelling follows biologically determined developmental stages (e.g. Gentry), a typical sequence = precommunicative-> semiphonetic-> phonetic-> transitional, and, finally, correct. However, spelling, like reading, is a human invention, not part of our biological development, and therefore cannot be properly acquired except through learning. Whole-language philosophy compels children to discover how the spelling system works for themselves.This is called invented or emergent spelling. Corrective feedback is not given as the assumption is that children will learn, naturally, to make closer and closer approximations to accurate spelling. Children are unlikely to learn to spell accurately with this method. Instead, they will practice and reproduce their spelling errors again and again, and produce unreadable writing with confidence-sapping results.

It's common for parents to say that their child is a good reader but a poor speller. This situation comes about because, as Vicki Lynch, an experienced primary teacher and synthetic phonics advocate, explains, 'These children have a strong whole-word visual strategy for recognising the shape of whole words when they see them, or have other strategies like guessing from pictures and the sentence and using partial phonics to make a good guess. This all gives the impression of good reading. However, they have clearly not been taught the alphabetic code (the 40+ speech sounds and their letter combinations) adequately enough to represent these words in their writing. Their memories are also not sufficient for remembering each part of the word for spelling after they have seen it in their reading so they are either remembering incorrectly the whole shape or the order or letters or are hearing the sounds in the words they want to write but lack the knowledge to represent all these sounds accurately. This is a product of literacy teaching today'.

Look, Cover, Write & Check is a very widely used but unproductive whole-language strategy for word learning. 'It is a visuo-motor method, involving eye and hand. It enchews the sounds of words, concentrating on letters, letter names and letter patterns' (Kerr p135). 'The child looks at the word, chants out the letters in it, covers the word and tries to remember the letter string, in the order they were written; then they uncover the original word and check that they have the letters in the right order. Can they read it? In many cases, NO. So, they go away and memorise those letter strings for their spelling test. By a great feat of memory they get the spellings all right for the test, fine, but then what happens? Those letter strings have no significance for them, so they forget which order they come in, "I know it's got an 'o' and a 'u' in it, but I can't remember which way round they go...". And they're loaded with more words to 'learn' for the next test, so it gets harder to remember those original letter strings. If they can't read the word, how will they know they've spelled it correctly in the future?

To succeed, for the majority of children, spelling has to be directly related to the way the spelling of the word was worked out in the first place. Which was, of course, that the spoken word was broken down into its component sounds and each sound given a written symbol to represent it. There's nothing random about the letters in a word, each one is there for a purpose and if the child doesn't understand the 'purpose' of the letters, they will never have a secure grasp of spelling (unless s/he happens to have one of those exceptional memories which can retain every number in the telephone directory!!). We teach: Listen to the word spoken, break it into its phonemes, spell each phoneme in the order in which it comes in the word, SOUND OUT the word you have written, to check that all the sounds are there. IF the child is a good reader, looking at a word they have written wrongly *may* alert them to the fact that it 'looks wrong', but this is really only something that a skilled reader can do.' (maizie. Plato forum 14/07/07) For a synthetic phonic version of 'Look, Say, Cover, Write & Check' see - A practical spelling activity...

'Good spelling requires close attention to the letters in words and an understanding of the logic which determines their order. This logic is that the order of written letters or letter-groups (graphemes) follows the order of the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.' (Chew p12) '(A) printed word is a time-chart of sounds' (Diack p59)

The present 'mixture of methods' used to teach reading in the majority of primary schools includes only a small part of the alphabet code. In addition, the 'mixture' is invariably used alongside whole-word reading books which 'make no attempt to introduce only simple regular words in the early stages; thus children do not become familiarised with some basic patterns of English orthography before they encounter the irregularities... The result is that many children fail to understand that spelling follows patterns and are consequently daunted by what they see as the need to learn every word separately.' (Chew p12)

'To be effective for spelling as well as for reading, phonics teaching needs to be thorough and systematic: in reading, children need to be taught to sound out every letter or letter-group from beginning to end of a word so that they will be sensitised to both regularities and irregularities in the letter-sound correspondences.' (Chew p13)

'If children are taught to sound out all letters and letter-groups in words, some unconventional pronounciations may result, but these are easily corrected and are, in the meantime, extremely helpful for spelling The child who first sounds out the 'ch' in chemist like the 'ch' in chop, or sounds out 'vague' as two syllables, the second rhyming with 'due', is much more likely eventually to spell tricky words correctly than the child who learns to read by memorising words as wholes. (Chew p13)

Spelling skill is influenced by IQ (approx. 25% of variance), sex (girls are usually superior spellers) and reading (decoding ability). Poor spellers are likely to be poor readers who do not read or write very often. They tend to have a limited vocabulary and fail 'to pay close attention to internal spelling patterns in multi-syllable words' (McGuinness ERI p269) Poor spellers often have the correct spelling in mind but are unable to recall it accurately from memory. 'Reading and spelling are reversible processes, and should be taught in tandem so that this reversibility is obvious... but they draw on different memory skills. Decoding, or reading, involves recognition memory, memory with a prompt. The letters remain visible while they are being decoded. Encoding, or spelling, involves recall memory, memory without prompts or clues, which is considerably more difficult' (McGuinness ERI p37)

Luckily for those of us who have to learn to use an opaque writing system, we have fantastic brains. 'Brains are pattern analyzers...They actively resonate with recurring regularities in the input, and automatically keep score of the probabilities of recurring patterns.'(McGuinness ERI p47) and the English alphabet code is made up of many hundreds of patterns. 'Very little active memorization is necessary when learning is based on exposure to predictable patterns...our brains do the work for us' (McGuinness ERI p59) Where an opaque alphabet code is concerned there is only one way for the brain to 'remember' the many patterns and that is through massive exposure to, and the use of, CORRECTLY spelt words in print, i.e. lots and lots of reading AND writing. Studies done by the researchers Stanovich and Cunningham showed that spelling knowledge is directly related to print exposure and builds from the very start of literacy instruction.

If your child suffers from 'Sesquipedalophobia': a fear of long words (thanks Tricia!), then the following activity devised by David Lisgo, an EFL teacher in Japan, may help:

'A simple and stress free way to introduce a child to longer words is an activity which chains vc (vowel /consonant) nonwords together. First, prepare a number of vc cards, for example "ed, ol, ix, at, ef, un, eg" and more. Start with one card and have the child read it, then add a second card and read them "ed_ix" for example, and a third card and read them all and so on. If the child is good at it and then have her or him move or lengthen the consonant (in thought and speech) to encourage linking, for example "e_dol_lix_(s)a_tef_fun_neg". I will do this in a small class, usually 6-8 pupils, with each pupil building their own chain, but before tidying the cards away we will make a large circular chain and I challenge a pupil to read the long word of about 60 letters, before long everyone, including myself, is reading this very long word.' (www.syntheticphonics.com.11/05/05)

Main points for helping with spelling:

• Don't teach letter names- ay, bee, see, dee... to beginner readers. Letter name learning is seriously detrimental to the teaching of early reading and spelling as it forces children to translate from letter name to sound.
  
• Do get children to write down the words that they need to remember how to spell. The physical act of writing helps to bind words in memory. Experimental studies have shown that copying letters is the best way to learn them...copying spelling words halves the learning rate compared to using letter tiles or a computer keyboard (RRF 49 p21) 'Writing helps in many ways. First the physical act of forming the letters forces the child to look closely at the features that make one letter different from another...Second, writing letters (left to right) trains the ability to read left to right. Third, saying each sound as the letter is written helps anchor the sound-to-letter connection in the memory.' (McGuinness GRB p239)
  
• Do encourage children to say the sound (not the letter name) as they write down each grapheme. Hearing their own voice acts as a cue.
  
• Do explain that syllables (word chunks) are like beats in music. If your child puts a flat hand under their chin they can count the number of syllables in a word as they speak it, just by feeling how many times their jaw drops.
  
• Don't split sounds when 'chunking' a multi-syllable word to make it easier to spell, eg.pillow - splits into pi/llow or pill/ow, not pil/low, as the /ll/ is one sound.
  
• Do encourage the technique of 'perfect pronunciation' as a spelling strategy: e.g. 'Wenzday' sound-out W/e/d/n/e/s/d/ay, 'peeple' sound-out p/ee/o/p/ul, ''knight'' sound-out k/n/igh/t, ''Febury'' sound-out F/e/b/r/oo/a/r/ee, and over-emphasis the correct sound when learning words with a schwa e.g. doct'uh' sound-out d/o/c/t/or, 'pockit' sound-out p/o/ck/e/t.
  
• Don't write down the complete word when you are asked for help with a spelling, once the basic code has been taught; just give the 'tricky' bit e.g. 'cream', only help with 'ea', write it down and say that this is the spelling of /ee/ in this particular word; 'proud', only help with 'ou', write it down and say that this is the spelling of /ow/ in this particular word.
  
• Don't let children write or view misspelled words by doing 'invented spelling' and avoid making lists of whole words to try out different spellings e.g. child writes gait, gate, gayt, geat, geit... to see which one 'looks right'. '...looking at mis-spelled words increases spelling errors over the short and long terms...The visual system of the brain automatically codes what it sees. It doesn't adjudicate between 'right' and 'wrong' (McGuinness GRB p260)
  
  Spelling Rules: Jenny Chew says, 'I only ever taught my students 3 rules, which I called 'drop, swop and double'. They are all related to what happens when suffixes are added to base words'. She adds, 'These rules are for the spelling-beyond-the-beginner stage, not about beginning-reading or beginning-spelling'.
  
  Drop a silent 'e' before adding a suffix beginning with a vowel, including 'y' (unless the 'e' is needed to keep a 'c' or 'g' soft). So we get 'hoping', 'smiled' (the 'e' is not the original silent 'e' but part of the suffix), 'operator', 'smoky' etc., but 'outrageous' and 'serviceable' (the 'e' stays in to keep the 'g' and 'c' soft). Even if the students didn't master the soft 'c' and 'g' bit, just knowing the other bit helped them to spell dozens of words correctly which they might otherwise have misspelt. I taught 'wholly', 'duly', 'truly', 'awful' and 'argument' as exceptions.

  Swop the 'y' at the end of a base word for an 'i' before adding any suffix at all unless there is a vowel before the 'y' or the suffix itself begins with 'i'. Hence 'marriage', 'carried', 'reliable' etc. but 'conveyor', 'displayed', 'enjoyment' (vowel before the 'y') and 'carrying', copyist' (suffix begins with 'i').

  Double a single consonant after a single short stressed vowel before adding a suffix beginning with a vowel. Hence 'hopping', 'beginner', 'stepped', 'forgotten', 'referral' etc.

For spelling resources go to Resources 3

www.sounds-write.co.uk/documents/spelling_theory_and_lexicon.pdf A Lexicon of English spellings

http://www.rrf.org.uk/newsletter.php?n_ID=52 Tom Burkard: Invented spellings

www.nrrf.org/42_invented_spelling.html A Critique of Invented Spelling

www.sntp.net/education/illiteracy.htm The new illiteracy -invented spelling.

www.omniglot.com A guide to writing systems.

www.jaars.org/museum/alphabet/index.htm JAARS Alphabet Museum.

www.exploratorium.edu/exploring/language Where do languages come from?

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