All computers come with spellcheckers and iPhones autocorrect their users’ texts. But despite those everyday features, formal spelling instruction still pays off, the findings of a new study suggest.
This 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—but also boosted their reading abilities.
“Spelling, especially when you think about early literacy, isn’t just about accuracy all the time,” said Brennan Chandler, an assistant professor of dyslexia at Georgia State University. “It’s really about how we can help kids crack the code of written language, and build that mental dictionary that makes word-reading automatic.”
The findings add to an existing body of research demonstrating that teaching spelling can make students stronger readers. And they also point to what kind of spelling instruction might deliver the greatest returns.
“We really looked under the hood,” said Chandler. “We wanted to find, what are the active ingredients that make spelling approaches really matter?”
States’ new reading laws often don’t reference spelling
It’s an especially salient question now, as more than 25 states have passed laws or implemented new policies mandating evidence-based reading instruction in the past five years alone.
Still, most of these 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.
Other research has found that teachers of upper elementary students with reading disabilities only spent about 2% of instructional time on spelling.
Learning to read words and learning to spell words are two sides of the same coin, researchers say.
When teachers teach phonics, they are showing students how letters represent sounds. Students use their knowledge of those letter-sound connections to sound out words in reading. But they also use that knowledge to write words, representing the words’ pronunciation through the letters they put down on the page.
Spelling well also frees up brain space for children while they’re writing, said Chandler. “Spelling takes up so much cognitive capacity,” he said.
If students don’t know how to spell a tricky word that they might use regularly, like “said,” they have to pause and try to figure it out every time—potentially interrupting their thoughts about what to write next or how to make their argument, Chandler said.
Focus on phonics, spelling rules, morphology: What spelling lessons can look like
In the meta-analysis, Chandler and his colleagues 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. Still 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, though, were the only type that had a positive effect on students’ word-reading.
What might this kind of spelling instruction look like in a kindergarten or 1st grade classroom? It can be integrated into how teachers teach phonemic awareness—the identification and manipulation of spoken sounds—or into phonics, said Chandler.
For example, a teacher might ask students to break down a word orally, stretching it out 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.
“We don’t want kids to just memorize words,” Chandler said. “We want them to unlock the pattern.”
