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 code, we would not have the difficulties with English reading and spelling that we do today.

It has been assumed, wrongly, that spelling follows biologically determined developmental stages (e.g. Gentry), a typical given 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 teaching. Whole-language philosophy expects children to discover how to spell for themselves.This is called invented or emergent spelling. Mistakes are not corrected as the assumption is that children will learn, naturally, to make closer and closer approximations to correct spelling. Children are unlikely to learn to spell accurately with this method. Instead, they will practise and reproduce their spelling errors again and again, and produce unreadable writing with confidence-sapping results.

Sometimes parents say that their child is a reasonably good reader but a poor speller. This situation comes about because, as teacher Vicki Lynch 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. This is a product of literacy teaching today'. Research by Frith supports Lynch's contention that good readers/poor spellers have been taught literacy through the 'balanced approach' which focuses on the visual aspects of words and neglects phonemes. As a result, they lack phonemic awareness and processing skills, and advanced alphabet code knowledge, which are vital to achieve good spelling. Frith, 'assembled a group of teenage good readers/poor spellers'. Though their reading ages were normal, investigation revealed that 'their word recognition was very 'visual' in nature; they were whole-word readers with poor phonological skills (evidenced by poor nonword reading) (A.Ellis p91)

Look, Say, 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 eschews 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', below.

'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)

Whole language reading books with predictable or repetitive text, '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 pronunciations 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 more 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' (D.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' (D.McGuinness ERI p37)

Luckily, for those of us who have to learn to use an opaque spelling 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' (D.McGuinness ERI p47) and the English alphabet spelling code is made up of hundreds of patterns. Where an opaque alphabet code is concerned, the best way to help the brain to 'remember' the code's patterns with minimum effort is through 'controlled exposure and varied repetition' (D.McGuinness ERI p59).'Very little active memorization is necessary when learning is based on exposure to predictable patterns...our brains do the work for us' (D.McGuinness ERI p59) In the Sound Reading System learners are exposed to the most common spelling alternatives of a particular phoneme at least four times in a lesson using a variety of multi-sensory activities.

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 the alphabet letter names- ay, bee, see, dee..etc. to beginning 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, impeding instant recall of the sound-letter correspondences. Letter names are especially harmful for children with paired-associate learning difficulties.
  
• Don't tell students how to spell words by relaying the letter names as 'this fails to model, or make explicit, what most proficient spellers do themselves to spell longer and more challenging words!' (Hepplewhite)
• 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. '(M)otor activity promotes memory' (D.McGuinness. ERI p114) Experimental studies have shown that copying words by hand 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, also see link below) '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.' (D.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 powerful cue -see point above.
• Do teach spellings in the context of real words. 'Comparing the spellings in context [of real words] increases the brain's ability to analyse and therefore remember'' (Nevola.SRS Handbook p113). Additionally, '(T)he spelling <k>, for example, on its own has no meaning in and of itself. For that reason it fails to hold the attention or interest of some children. However, the ‘k’ in 'cat' does have meaning. It has a context and it has relevance: the family has a cat; next door's cat come in to dig up their garden; a cat scratched them once; they like to stroke cats. Teaching sound-spelling correspondences in the context of words also has the powerful effect of grounding both sounds and spellings in everyday words' (Walker.RRF message board)
• Do use the English alphabet code's probability structure as the basis for deciding which spellings are essential to teach. 'A probability structure is the calculation of the number of spellings used the most to those used the least. This calculation must be based on frequency in print (how often these spellings appear in print). It is only essential to teach the main spellings, those used most in written text' (D.McGuinness.OurRightToRead) see- 'Allographs Dictionary of Common English Words'.
  Do say that all words, without exception, have a vowel spelling and that it can consist of 1- 4 letters consecutively or 2 vowel letters 'split' e.g. try, pie, knight, height, slime
• Do say that <y> represents a vowel sound (my, myth, funny..) or is part of a vowel digraph (oy, ay, ey..) more often than a consonant /y/ellow. In fact, some phonic experts say that <y> always represents a vowel sound - if you listen carefully, the <y> at the beginning of words sounds /ee/
  Don't split the letters forming a grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) when 'chunking' a multi-syllable word for spelling, e.g. pillow - splits into pi/llow or pill/ow, not pil/low, as the <ll> is one sound /l/, whistle splits into whist/le or whi/stle as the <st> is one sound /s/.
• Do use the technique of 'perfect pronunciation' as a spelling strategy: e.g. <Wednesday> sound out Wed-nes-day, <February> sound out Feb-roo-a-ry, and over-emphasize the correct sound for spelling when learning words with a schwa e.g. doc'tuh' sound out doctOR, pock'it' sound out pockEt, ca'rrut' sound out carrOt...
• Don't write down the complete word when you are asked for help with a spelling once your child can confidently read and write words using basic code; 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.
• Do say that the common Latin suffix /shun/ is usually spelled -tion, but if the word is for a person or occupation -cian is more likely. '-tian spellings indicate the place from which the person or thing derives (Martian, Alsatian, Croatian, Egyptian, etc.); -cean spellings are related to the sea (ocean, crustacean, cetacean)' (J.Walker.Sounds-Write)
• 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, geight... to see which one 'looks right'. '...looking at misspelled 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' (D.McGuinness GRB p260) For 'The negative impact of seeing misspelled words' see p117-121 in Diane McGuinness's book Early Reading Instruction.
• Do give plenty of support to achieve correct spelling; when testing students on words containing a particular phoneme, before the test write, or get the student to write, all the previously taught spelling alternatives across the top of the paper or board. e.g. when testing words containing the phoneme /ee/ such as sheep, clean, sunny, merry, these, he, bean, feet, eve, me; write <ea> <ee> <e> <y> <e-e>. Do the same before starting any writing exercise focusing on a particular phoneme.
  .............................................................................
  Spelling 'Rules' for older students : 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.
....................................................................................
A practical spelling activity for children working at Advanced Code level.
Make a ‘Word Puzzle’ sheet for each sound when you are introducing the spelling variations of the Advanced Code. These are to practise what has been covered in the lesson and is a synthetic phonic version of 'Look, Say, Cover, Write and Check'. Word Puzzles are A4 sheets divided into small squares, filled with a variety of common words containing the phoneme that you are working on at the time, one grapheme per square.
For example, the /ow/ sound sheet might have the words
c l ou d y
th ou s a n d s
b r ow n
s u rr ou n d e d
c ow ar d
p r ow l i ng
d ou bt
b ough s
etc.
The instructions are:
1. Student reads the word and decides how many syllables it has (with help if necessary), then draws a horizontal line for each syllable in an exercise book.
2. Parent/ helper cuts the word up into individual squares and lays them out in a muddled order. The activity can be made more of a challenge if, once read, ALL the words on the sheet are cut up at the beginning, rather than one at a time. If this is done, it's important for the tutor or parent to write out a separate list of all the words BEFORE cutting begins!
3. Student reassembles the word (with help if necessary), sticking the squares on the syllable lines, saying each sound whilst doing so, finally saying the whole word.
4. Underline any ‘tricky' GPC + schwas, using a coloured pencil. Optional: find and write some other words with that particular tricky GPC to see if any patterns are thrown up.
5. Look carefully at the word, concentrating on the tricky bit/s.
6. Cover the word and, underneath it, write the word from memory saying each sound whilst doing so.
7. Check back and write it again if necessary.
8. Optional. Write a sentence using the word to show you understand its meaning.
9. Optional. Do a dictation of the words or sentences at a later date.

The sticking and colouring adds a kinaesthetic element to this spelling lesson.

N. B. Word Puzzle sheets could be adapted and used by secondary schools for age-appropriate, cross-curricular, spelling practice; teachers would create puzzle sheets+ lists using words specific to their particular subject, each word having previously been worked on (read, syllable 'chunked', tricky bit underlined...) on the board, in the lesson.

For spelling resources go to Resources

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8271656/Write-it-dont-type-it-if-you-want-knowledge-to-stick.html
'The process of putting pen to paper and reading from a book seems to imprint knowledge in the brain in a better way than using a keyboard and computer screen'.

http://www.rrf.org.uk/pdf/spelling-rules-ok.pdf
Jenny Chew's booklet 'Spelling Rules'

www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/teaching-spelling-how-5079
Debbie Hepplewhite: How to teach spelling

www.spelling.co.nz/Resources/Documents/teacher_questionnaire.pdf
Teacher training -spelling questions

www.spelling.co.nz/Resources/Documents/teacher_questionnaire_answer.pdf
Teacher training -spelling answers

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter0809/joshi.pdf
How words cast their spell: Spelling Is an Integral Part of Learning the Language, Not a Matter of Memorization

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter0506/Moats.pdf
How spelling supports reading: And Why It Is More Regular and Predictable Than You May Think

http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=52&n_issueNumber=53
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.

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/DOWNLOADS%20pdfs%20for%20ozideas/Book_of_spells&misspells.pdf
Simplified Spelling advocate, Valerie Yule's book, free to download: The Book of Spells and Misspells.

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