Spelling lists. Spelling tests. Spelling bees. Adults of a certain age who remember anything about elementary school likely recall spelling as central to their literacy instruction. That’s not necessarily true anymore.
Spelling’s prominent role in literacy instruction has dwindled significantly in recent years. Hundreds of schools and districts have dropped spelling tests and explicit spelling instruction from their curriculum, according to a 2021 report from Educational Psychology Review, and spelling no longer appears on all state standardized tests.
Even as “science of reading” mandates sweep across the country, requiring schools to use evidence-based methods for teaching young students how to read, spelling rarely is mentioned in the conversation. Some skeptics of spelling instruction cite the advent of spellcheck technologies, including artificial intelligence, as proof that students no longer need to know how to spell. But literacy experts ardently disagree.
“Spelling is a highly accurate window into children’s understanding of language and literacy,” said Molly Ness, a reading researcher and teacher-educator at City University of New York, Brooklyn College. “It’s so predictive of their understanding of how words work and the synchrony of spelling, vocabulary, and word knowledge.”
As longtime spelling authority Richard Gentry sees it, the absence of spelling in literacy instruction is akin to cutting off one leg of a three-legged stool.
“Spelling kickstarts the process of reading and writing, and it does this by connecting to [brain] circuitry, where the sounds and pronunciation of words already exist in spoken language,” said Gentry. “Spelling literally ignites the reading and writing process.”
Being able to spell accurately drives reading automaticity, which in turn allows for fluency and, ultimately, greater comprehension, Gentry explained.
“If you can spell a word automatically, and you have the word sound and meaning in your spoken vocabulary, you can map the spellings on the page or screen to your already existing spoken language,” he said.
How spelling instruction waned in relevance
Critics of spelling instruction sometimes point to the ubiquity of technology available to correct a writer’s spelling—like spellchecker software and, more recently, AI-powered spellcheck tools—as a reason why students no longer need to learn how to spell.
Some critics also argue that the English language’s unpredictable nature makes it too difficult to expect students to become proficient spellers, said Shawna Kay Williams-Pinnock, a lecturer in The Mico University College’s department of language, literacy, and literature in Kingston, Jamaica. It’s a notion the literacy expert flatly rejects.
“More regularly spelled words with specific letter-sound patterns exist in English than we think there are,” Williams-Pinnock said. “Only about 13 percent of the 400,000 or so words in the English dictionary do not have a regular pattern. The majority can be spelled phonetically.”
But for many years—primarily through the 1980s and into the 1990s—the “whole language” movement that dominated literacy instruction downplayed or outright dismissed the importance of teaching students to spell phonetically. Instead, it stressed that students learn to read through exposure to and immersion in books.
In What’s Whole in Whole Language, originally published in 1986, the late Kenneth Goodman, who’s considered the father of the whole language movement, calls for educators to “put aside the carefully sequenced basal readers, spelling programs, and handwriting kits.”
A large body of literacy research, however, debunked Goodman’s ideas that students learn to read by relying primarily on context clues. It concluded, instead, that skilled readers do rely heavily on knowledge of letter-sound correspondences when learning new words. It’s exactly that knowledge that’s integral to spelling.
Strategies for implementing spelling into early literacy curriculum
Spelling instruction should start from the moment you begin teaching students how to decode words, said Williams-Pinnock, who added that it’s best taught as part of phonics lessons.
She described it as a three-part process, whereby the teacher introduces the principle of the letter-sound relationship (for example, the short “a” vowel sound), students read together examples of words that share this principle, and then they attempt to spell words with the spelling pattern taught.
In this explicit method of instruction, students apply phonics principles to spelling, as opposed to simply memorizing a list of words, a method denounced by most literacy experts that long dominated spelling instruction.
“We have to move away from rote memorization,” said Williams-Pinnock, who notes that when she was in school, she and her classmates would receive a list of words and be expected to commit that list to memory.
“Students need to understand the letter-sound relationships and certain spelling principles and rules that they can then apply in spelling,” she said. “You can’t expect students to memorize all 400,000 words.”
This explicit method of instruction, ingrained into phonics lessons, requires a significant commitment during class time—and it’s something that’s not emphasized enough, said Gentry. He has reviewed recently published curricula that tout evidence-based literacy instruction—but recommend as little as 20 minutes’ worth of spelling instruction weekly.
In elementary school, “they should be doing 20 minutes [of spelling instruction] every day,” he said.
The following tips can help early literacy teachers reach that goal.
- Make spelling an integral part of your phonics lesson.
- Give students dictation based on the sound-letter principle you’re focusing on.
- Model the thought process of sounding out words.
- Make it fun: Play games, use friendly competition like spelling bees, and incorporate movement.
- Provide students an opportunity to learn words they want to know how to spell.
