by Madelon van den Boer & Elise H. de Bree
Original article: LINK
Spelling is important because it affects how others perceive your writing. Misspelled words can make text harder to read and lower its credibility. Good spelling skills are linked to success in writing, school, and even career choices. So, it’s crucial to understand how people learn to spell and how we should teach it.
Different theories suggest various ways people pick up spelling, like through sounds, patterns, or memorisation. Research often focuses on how we naturally learn spelling, but less on how teaching impacts it.
Teaching methods usually emphasise direct instruction, but they don’t always consider how much just seeing words written correctly helps. In this study, the researchers compare the effects of learning spelling implicitly (like just seeing lots of words) versus explicitly (getting direct teaching) for Dutch words that follow specific rules.
In Dutch, it’s harder to predict how sounds are spelled than how spellings are pronounced. For instance, only about 37% of the time can you guess the spelling of a word from how it sounds, but about 85% of the time you can correctly pronounce a word based on its spelling. Learning to spell isn’t just about matching sounds to letters. Sometimes, spelling rules clash with how words are pronounced, like when a word’s meaning affects its spelling. This can be tricky to learn, especially with rules like spelling nouns consistently, regardless of whether they’re singular or plural.
Children pick up some spelling skills just by seeing words around them, even without direct teaching. They absorb what words look like and how letters fit together, often without realising it. This ability improves with age and with more exposure to reading.
However, relying solely on what children pick up on their own can lead to mistakes. Even after being taught spelling rules, they might not apply them correctly. That’s why explicit teaching—directly explaining rules and practising them—is important. It helps children understand why words are spelled the way they are and how to apply those rules consistently.
But even with explicit teaching, some words continue to trip children up. For example, in Dutch, nouns ending in certain sounds are spelled differently depending on their context, like whether they’re singular or plural. Despite being taught these rules, many children still make mistakes.
In their study, van den Boer and de Bree wanted to see if extra practice could help children spell better, especially for words ending in -t or -d. These words can be tricky because their spelling depends on whether they’re singular or plural. Children were already taught this during Grade 2, so the study focused on how to reinforce this learning. They split the children into groups: one group did extra practice where they explicitly went over the spelling rules, another group did practice but without explicitly discussing the rules (implicit practice), and a third group didn’t have any extra practice.
After five sessions, the children were tested on the words they practised, similar words they hadn’t practised, and other words that followed the same rule but ended in -p or -b. It was expected that the explicit practice group would improve because previous research suggests that directly teaching spelling rules helps. The researchers also thought implicit practice might help because it focuses children’s attention on correct spellings without directly teaching them the rules.
They looked not only at how many words the children spelt correctly but also at the types of mistakes they made. Some mistakes might show children are relying too much on how words sound, while others might indicate they don’t fully understand the meanings of the words they’re spelling. By analysing the errors, the researchers wanted to see if extra practice helped the children use the spelling rules correctly or if it improved their overall understanding of word spellings.
Children had five extra sessions of spelling practice, each lasting around 20 to 30 minutes, spread over three weeks. This added up to about two hours of extra practice time. These sessions were held at school but not during their usual spelling class.
What they did in each session:
- Explicit practice: Pupils were taught the spelling rule clearly before each exercise. They then did activities like sorting pictures or writing words down, focusing on applying the rule correctly. They got feedback on their answers to help them learn.
- Picture sorting: Children sorted pictures based on whether the word ended in -d, -t, or something else.
- Animated dictation: Pupils watched moving pictures and wrote down the words they saw.
- Flash cards: Students worked in pairs, writing down words dictated by one child and then showing flashcards to their partner to write the word they saw.
- Implicit practice: Children played “word games” without realising they were practising spelling. They were exposed to the target words in various activities designed to keep their attention on the words.
- Word flash: Children watched slideshows of words and counted how many were in colour. Target words were always in colour.
- Lexical decision: Students circled real words in a list, including the target words.
- Passage reading: Children read stories where target words appeared, and they had to find specific letters (either ‘d’ or ‘t’) while answering questions about the story.
Both types of extra practice—explicit and implicit—helped improve spelling, especially for words the children practised directly. However, neither type of practice seemed to help with words the children hadn’t practised or with generalisation words. Interestingly, they found no big differences between explicit and implicit practice. This goes against some previous studies that suggested explicit instruction was more effective. However, their results suggest that a combination of both explicit and implicit practice could be beneficial.
They also looked at the types of errors children made, which were mostly -t/-d errors. Both types of errors decreased with extra practice, showing that children don’t just rely on one method to spell words.
In conclusion, both explicit and implicit practice helped improve spelling for these students, but continuous repetition and practice with different spelling rules would be needed. The study suggests that a mix of explicit and implicit practice could keep spelling lessons engaging and effective.