Research demonstrates that teaching spelling can make students stronger readers, according to an Education Week article. Even with computer spellcheckers and iPhones that autocorrect their users’ texts, formal spelling instruction still pays off, the findings of a new study suggest. A recent meta-analysis examined 59 studies of spelling interventions for students who had, or were at risk for, learning disabilities across grades K-9. The lessons had a small but significant effect on children’s spelling and also boosted their reading abilities.
The research is relevant as more than 25 states have passed laws or implemented new policies mandating evidence-based reading instruction in the past five years.
Most laws don’t explicitly mention spelling—or writing—alongside other components of literacy, such as vocabulary or fluency, according to a 2023 analysis by the Shanker Institute.
Learning to read words and learning to spell words are two sides of the same coin, researchers say.
Phonics teaching shows students how letters represent sounds. Knowledge of letter-sound connections is used to sound out words in reading. That knowledge is also used to write words, representing the words’ pronunciation through the letters they put down on the page.
The meta-analysis examined different categories of spelling lessons to identify which interventions would best meet different instructional goals.
Some interventions focused on letter-sound knowledge, which the researchers called “phonemic” interventions. Others asked students to memorize the spellings of whole words. And others explicitly taught spelling rules, or focused on morphology—teaching students to spell word parts, like common prefixes and suffixes that also carry clues to a word’s meaning. Some interventions combined multiple approaches.
Lessons aimed at having students memorize whole words had the largest positive effect, but only on students’ ability to spell the specific words they memorized. Some of the studies showed evidence that the effect didn’t transfer to spelling ability in general.
Interventions that used multiple approaches—teaching letter-sound connections and spelling rules, for example—also had small positive effects on spelling ability.
Lessons focused solely on letter-sound connections were the only type that had a positive effect on students’ word-reading.
Spelling instruction in a kindergarten or 1st grade classroom can be integrated into how teachers teach phonemic awareness—the identification and manipulation of spoken sounds—or into phonics, says one of the researchers.
A teacher might ask students to break down a word orally to hear the different sounds. Then the teacher could link letters to each sound in the word and ask students to practice writing the word.
The goal is to go beyond memorizing words to understand patterns in letter-sound connections.
Education Week
