Article Review: From Reading to Spelling and Spelling to Reading : Transfer Goes Both Ways

Article Review: From Reading to Spelling and Spelling to Reading : Transfer Goes Both Ways by Nicole Conrad (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2008, vol. 100, no. 4, 869-78)

Teaching spelling has gone rather out of fashion. I remember Louisa Moats saying at a conference that when she went to schools to explore ways that they could improve their teaching of spelling, she discovered that many teachers were, simply, not teaching spelling at all.

In fact, consistent with whole language philosphy, writers such as Krashen suggest that

"While there is ample evidence that diverting attention to spelling when writing 'disrupts the planning process' of writing, there is an alternative to those who propose spending more time on direct spelling instruction:

Advise writers to delay focusing on correct spelling until their ideas are firmly in place, while, at the same time, building up spelling competence through massive reading."

The assumption is that by seeing a word correctly spelled multiple times, the student will remember how to spell it.

Nicole Conrad investigates the validity of this assumption in this article. 41 students were placed in two groups: 20 in a "reading practice" group, and 21 in a "spelling practice" group. They were given repeated practice with forty words in reading and spelling, respectively. The 40 words were 8 groups of 5 words each from different orthographic families (e.g., shore, chore, snore, core and sore).

Students practiced reading via flashcards; spelling was practiced by being presented with the words and then having the students spell them, then see the words again and correct any errors. The author notes that it's important to realize that students in the "spelling" group had ample opportunity to read the words, and so that group might better be called the "reading and spelling" practice group.

The results?

The spellers could read *and* spell almost all of the words. The readers could read them ... but spelling did not fare so well. I find no reason to believe that more "massive" reading would shift this trend.

Students in each group were also tested in how well they had generalized the reading and spelling of the orthographic patterns. "Although both groups were
equally accurate with the new words with practiced units, the
difference between new words with and without practiced units
was greater for the spellers (25%) than for the readers (13%),
... reflecting the spellers’ less accurate performance with new words with unpracticed units." New words with "practiced units" would end in the same rime (e.g, "bore") while unpracticed units would not ("droop"). However, the tasks were different. Had the *readers* been asked to *spell* words from unpracticed units, the difference may have been insignificant. To me, this simply speaks again to the value of practicing spelling and the invalidity of assuming that it is a skill that will be learned via visual exposure to correct spellings.

The students in the study were screened so that they all fell into the "average" reader category. If you want your students to read *and* spell well, teach them to spell! (And practice!)