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Spelling Development
Students’ spellings are not just random mistakes.
There is an underlying logic to students’ errors that
change over time, moving from using but confusing
elements of sound to using but confusing elements
of pattern and meaning.
Word study is developmental.
• Learners differ in the level of their word
knowledge.
• Teachers must differentiate instruction for
different levels of word knowledge and “teach
where the child is at” (p. 8).
• Teachers need to identify the instructional level
of the child-- what the child already knows.
• An easy way to identify a child’s instructional
level is to look at the way s/he spells words.
Determining Orthographic Knowledge:
1. What students do correctly—an independent
or easy level
2. What students use but confuse—an
instructional level where instruction is most
helpful
3. What is absent in students’ spelling—a
frustration level where spelling concepts are
too difficult
Emergent Stage (0-5 years)
• Large scribbles that are basically
drawings. The movements may be
circular, and children may tell a story
while drawing.
• At first, there are usually no designs
that look like letters, and the writing is
undecipherable from the drawing.
• Towards the middle of this stage,
students place “pretend writing” next
to the pictures although there is still
no relationship between letters and
sound, but shapes that are “letterlike” will become evident.
• Writing may occur in any direction but
is generally linear and some letters
will become known.
• Spelling may range from random
marks to legitimate letters that bear a
relationship to sound.
Emergent Stage
• Children who are exposed to literacy
activities begin to learn elements of print
literacy.
• Children begin to learn letters, particularly
letters in their own names.
• Children begin to pay attention to the
sounds in words. Toward the end of this
stage, their writing starts to include the
most salient sounds in a word.
• The movement to the next stage, Letter
Name-Alphabetic Spelling Stage, hinges
on learning the alphabetic principle:
Letters represent sounds in a systematic
way, and words can be segmented into
sequences of sound from left to right.
• Toward the end of this stage, students
start to memorize some words and write
them repeatedly, such as cat, Mom, love,
and Dad.
Letter Name-Alphabetic Stage
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Students learn to segment the sounds (i.e., phonemes)
within words and to match the appropriate letters or
letter pairs to those sounds.
Students in this stage use the names of the letters as
cues to the sound they want to represent.
Early letter name-alphabetic spellers find matches
between letters and the spoken word by how the
sound is made or articulated in the mouth.
Early letter name-alphabetic writing often lacks spacing
between words.
In the beginning of this stage, students apply the
alphabetic principle primarily to consonants--at first
the beginning consonant and then beginning and
ending consonants, omitting the vowel.
Typically only the first sound of a two-letter consonant
blend is represented, as in FT for float.
Once the beginning and ending sounds are in place and
students develop a concept of word, they will begin to
notice the middle of the word--the vowel. Often at first
the vowel phoneme is represented by random vowel
letters in their writing.
Letter Name-Alphabetic Stage
• Gradually, letter name-alphabetic spellers start to
segment both sounds in a consonant blend and begin
to represent the blends correctly, as in GRAT for great.
• Towards the end of this stage, students start to use
vowels consistently. Long vowels, which “say their
name,” appear in tim for time and hop for hope, but
silent letters are not represented.
• Short vowels are used but confused as in miss
spelled as mes and much as moch.
• By the end of this stage, students are able to
consistently represent most regular short-vowel
sounds, digraphs, and consonant blends because they
have full phonemic segmentation.
• The letters n and m as in bunk or lump are referred
to as preconsonantal nasals (nasals that come before a
consonant) and are generally omitted by students
throughout this stage when they spell them as BUK or
LUP.
• The correct spelling of the preconsonantal nasal is a
reliable sign that the student is moving into the next
stage of spelling development: the Within Word
Pattern Stage.
Within Word Pattern Stage
• Students can correctly spell most singlesyllable, short-vowel words as well as
consonant blends, digraphs, and
preconsonantal nasals.
• They move away from the linear, sound-bysound approach of the letter namealphabetic spellers and begin to include
patterns or chunks of letter sequences.
• Students at this stage study words by
sound and pattern simultaneously.
• They are transitioning from the alphabetic
layer to the meaning layer of English
orthography through patterns.
• Homophones force students to consider
the meaning layer of English orthography
when they spell words like bear and bare,
deer and dear, hire and higher
Syllables and Affixes Spelling Stage (9-14 years)
• Students are expected to spell many words of more than one syllable as
they progress through learning English orthography.
• Students must consider spelling patterns where syllables meet and meaning
units such as affixes (prefixes and suffixes) are combined with roots.
Operations such as doubling and silent e drop become evident in this stage.
• Early in this stage, most students spell most one-syllable short- and longvowel words correctly (went, west, drove, hike). Many of their errors are in
two- and three-syllable words and fall at the place where syllables and
affixes meet.
• Unstressed final syllables give students difficulty, as in spellings of LITTEL for
little and MOUNTIN for mountain.
• Students will gradually learn the basic operations and patterns that define
this stage before they transition into more meaning-based spelling
operations in the next stage: derivational relations.
Derivational Relations Spelling
• Eventually in learning English orthography, students must examine
how words share common derivations and related base words and
word roots. They must spell words based on the visual properties of
the words, rather than simply relying on the sounds of phonemes in
syllables.
• In this stage, the meaning and spelling of parts of words remain
constant across different but derivationally related words. Words
that share common morphemes are written so that the
morphemes are intact and traceable: The pronunciations will
change, but the spelling will remain the same, as in photo,
photograph, photography, photographic.
• At first in this stage, errors reflect a lack of knowledge about
derivations. For example, favorite is spelled FAVERITE and does not
show its relationship to favor, and different is spelled DIFFRENT and
lacks a connection to differ. As students learn more about word
meanings and related spelling, these errors disappear.
• Frequent errors have to do with the reduced vowel in derivationally
related pairs. For example, the word compete has a long e sound in
Developmental continuum of word knowledge