Should We Teach Spelling?
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #82
Hi! Last time I wrote about multiplication tables, and today the focus is on another basic skill – how we learn spelling.
I’ll focus particularly on spelling in English (I’m aware that some languages have fewer irregular spellings), and on a major review by literacy researchers Steve Graham and Tanya Santangelo. There’s a link below:
Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing, 27, 1703–1743.
The authors raise some interesting background findings, such as:
Teachers grade papers more harshly if they are poorly spelled;
The cognitive demands of spelling impacts on other (metacognitive) processes, such as planning;
There is a debate between those (e.g. Krashen) who think that spelling is best picked up incidentally via reading, and those who feel it should be taught directly.
The researchers also share a provocation at the outset:
“During this and virtually all of the last century, some scholars have argued that spelling should not be directly or formally taught.”
So, what did their review find?
Findings
The study was a meta-analysis, and took into account data from 53 other studies, with students ranging from kindergarten and up.
They found:
Formal spelling instruction was better than no spelling instruction. The effect was bigger with younger children, and smaller (but still significant) with older students.
It was also better than informal spelling instruction (which might include formative corrections by a teacher).
Formal spelling instruction led to improved spelling in the context of writing tasks, better phonological awareness, and better reading comprehension.
However, formal spelling instruction didn’t improve the quality of students’ writing.
The main takeaways from the study is that it’s really worthwhile to teach spelling, to do it early, and to spend plenty of time on it. Not only will it make students better at spelling, it will improve their reading, too.
The researchers had expected more of an impact on writing. The later part of the paper discusses why this wasn’t found, noting that writing practice was quite rare in the classrooms studied. If students weren’t getting a chance to practise writing, this could have led to the spelling instruction having less of an impact.
Subsequent research has suggested that instruction in both handwriting and spelling can impact students’ planning and composing of writing, and that these in turn impact the quality of what they write.
How to teach spelling
To avoid this update getting too long, I’ll probably write a separate post about the teaching of spelling another time. However, for now, it’s worth flagging up evidence that suggests that retrieval practice is more effective than rainbow writing as way of teaching spelling.
Rainbow writing is based on repetition via writing words in multiple colours. It minimises errors.
Retrieval practice leaves room for inaccuracies/errors, but is a desirable difficulty.
Unsurprisingly to me (and perhaps to you, as a reader of these updates), repetition turns out to be a bad way to learn, and error avoidance is unnecessary. This is very much in line with the ideas I shared last time regarding the teaching of number facts.
Have a good week!
Jonathan
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Yes please to a separate post on the teaching of spelling!