Dr Alison Madelaine provided expert commentary in an article in Education HQ, ‘Look, cover, say, write, fail’: expert urges schools to ditch rote spelling lists — published on Thursday 31 August, 2023.
“Even in the era of the spell checker, good spelling is an extremely important skill for a literate person to possess – it helps readers to understand what they are reading, while inaccurate spelling can make it difficult to communicate ideas,” she said.
“Spelling is also important for reading, and vice versa. Reading skills such as phonemic awareness and phonics are necessary for good spelling to develop, and instruction in spelling can result in better reading.”
Principal Damien Kitch from Victoria’s Upwey South Primary School, also comments in the article.
The school is one of 10 involved in a national pilot of SpellEx, a whole-class program developed by MultiLit that builds middle and upper primary students’ understanding of the English spelling system. Kitch reported the improvement in students’ spelling and writing skills had been “phenomenal”.
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‘Look, cover, say, write, fail’: expert urges schools to ditch rote spelling lists
Teachers should scrap weekly spelling lists that rely on rote learning and instead explicitly teach children spelling rules and conventions, a literacy researcher has urged.
Weekly spelling tests also do not allow for students to receive time critical feedback, Dr Alison Madelaine says.
The call from MultiLit Senior Research Fellow Dr Alison Madelaine comes after the latest NAPLAN results revealed 37 per cent of Year 3s and 29 per cent of Year 5s nationally are failing to reach proficiency in spelling.
Madelaine warned spelling lists – that usually require students to follow the ‘look, cover, say, write, check’ technique – fail to teach children how the English language works ‘under the bonnet’, and were an ineffective means of developing good spellers.
“There is far more research evidence supporting language-based spelling instruction as opposed to methods based mainly on rote memorisation,” she said.
“Language-based spelling instruction involves teaching children about linguistic concepts, such as speech sounds and patterns, relationships between letters and sounds, and word origins and meanings.”
Madelaine indicated that when children are taught the structural characteristics of the English language, they build the knowledge and skills to be able to spell many more words than those they’d encounter via spelling lists, including new and unknown words.
The expert added that weekly spelling tests also did not allow for students to receive time critical feedback, whereas teacher-led explicit instruction enabled errors to be identified immediately.
A large body of research shows that spelling ability correlates with overall reading and writing outcomes, with Dr Tessa Daffern noting that word recognition and spelling ability draw on the same underlying lexical representations.
“If spelling is robust, attention can be devoted to other cognitive resources required for higher-level reading (such as inferencing) and writing (such as selecting precise vocabulary),” Daffern wrote in a 2021 report.
“Students who struggle with spelling generally write less and use a more limited and imprecise vocabulary than students with better spelling skills.”
And while qualitative research shows poor spellers can find writing and reading tasks particularly challenging and stressful, empirical evidence suggests that students who struggle with spelling are more likely to underperform in writing, too.
Madelaine flagged that spelling and reading proficiency also feed into each other.
“Even in the era of the spell checker, good spelling is an extremely important skill for a literate person to possess – it helps readers to understand what they are reading, while inaccurate spelling can make it difficult to communicate ideas,” she said.
“Spelling is also important for reading, and vice versa. Reading skills such as phonemic awareness and phonics are necessary for good spelling to develop, and instruction in spelling can result in better reading.”
Victoria’s Upwey South Primary School no longer asks students to memorise lists of sight words.
“[We found] it wasn’t an effective way to develop spelling,” principal Damien Kitch said.
The school is one of 10 involved in a national pilot of SpellEx, a whole-class program developed by MultiLit that builds middle and upper primary students’ understanding of the English spelling system.
Kitch reported the improvement in students’ spelling and writing skills had been “phenomenal”. Indeed, the school’s latest NAPLAN results show that 84 per cent of Year 5s achieved in the top two proficiency levels in spelling and 94 per cent in writing.
Across similar schools, these figures sit at 71 per cent and 78 per cent respectively.