Last week I introduced you to my former student, Luke, who requested testing and tutoring since he was “tired of needing parental signatures on his tests and then having to serve in ‘time out’.” How many fifth grader pre-adolescent boys do you know who would have done that?
This week, I want to share with you the types of errors Luke made both when spelling individual words and while engaged in written language assignments–where he had to multitask juggling:
–his ideas
–his sentence structure; knowledge of grammar
–his vocabulary choices
–his use of punctuation and capitalization
–his spelling –his letter formation (and/or keyboarding)
–let’s not even consider the prospect of proofreading and editing…
Composing written language was indeed a difficult task for Luke and is likely a difficult task for many of our children. As a result of his issues, Luke wrote as little as possible, and did so most reluctantly even though he had quite a lot to say, often using sophisticated vocabulary and sometimes advanced sentence structures in his oral language.
If we can help children to understand the very consistent spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and sentence structure patterns, it will allow children more ‘brain space’ to concentrate on what content they wish to share and which words they wish to use when writing.
So back to Luke’s spelling. You can see his spelling assessments below. The first one assessed phonetically regular words (those that have reliable sound-symbol relationships and also follow reliable recurring spelling patterns).
Phonetically Regular Words 
High Frequency Non-Phonetic Words
The second one assessed High Frequency Non-Phonetic Words. You may have heard these words referenced as “Sight Words”–this is an incorrect reference and ought to be abandoned since the goal of reading instruction is to have nearly every word recognizable at first sight over about a 3-4 year period of time. You may also have heard these High Frequency Non-Phonetic Words referenced as “Heart Words” or “Trick Words”. Only about 15% of all English words are Non-Phonetic, but here is the kicker: since most of them occur frequently in English, children need to learn words such as ‘of’, ‘the’, ‘could’, ‘gone’, ‘because’, etc. very early on in their own reading and spelling journeys.
Luke could read these words with ease, but you can see that he still had difficulty with their spellings even after 6 years of literacy instruction.
Let’s analyze Luke’s errors. Why?
It will help you as a parent (or teacher) when observing your child’s spelling and written language. If your child manages to get a decent grade on the Friday spelling test, but is lacking in terms of retaining the correct spelling and/or applying patterns to words not specifically studied, this post is for you. This may occur even after you have spent an inordinate amount of time helping your child to ‘study’–or likely the better term is ‘memorize’. It is time to take notice and share your concerns with your child’s teacher–YES, this is a Call To Action!. Sometimes you may have to take matters into your own hands either by helping your child yourself or getting some help from a tutor.
Now back to Luke…
Phonetically Regular Word Errors (I am not analyzing each and every error)
1-quill spelled as ‘quil’ – Luke had no knowledge of the spelling convention to double f, l, s, and sometimes z at the end of a one syllable word after a short vowel
2-tonic spelled as ‘tincok’ – Well, all the letters are there, but Luke added a ‘k’ and has the letters in the incorrect order. His spelling indicated to me that he was not orthographically mapping each sound to a letter in the correct sequence. That is a fancy way of saying he was not listening to the sounds in order at all; rather, he was spelling using his faulty visual memory only. The correct way to orthographically map (visually map) tonic would be:
3-uninhibited spelled as ‘unihibited’ – The error here was the omission of the ‘n’ in the second syllable. Was Luke breaking this long word up into syllables and then spelling each one while listening to the sound in sequence?? Obviously not.
4-athletes spelled as ‘athleats’ – This is a very common error where a student encodes, or spells all the sounds in the correct sequence, but has difficulty choosing the letters (graphemes)/letter patterns to correctly spell the word.
5-confide spelled as ‘confied’ – One can think of this as the same issue as in the word ‘athletes’, but this spelling, as well as the error in microscopic spelled as ‘microscopice’ told me Luke had difficulty with suffix recognition since ‘confide’ is a verb on its own and he was confused with the usage of the past tense suffix -ed, and the suffix -ic obviously does not have a final ‘e’. An additional error noted of this type was spelling spitefully as ‘spitfuly’ Again, difficulty noted with the omission of a final ‘e’, as well as difficulty adding two suffixes to the base word (-ful and -ly).6-administrate spelled as ‘addministrate’ – Luke made the common error of ‘spelling a little word inside a big word’; Luke was clueless in terms of when to double consonants in English words. Doubling consonants indicates that the preceding vowel will have a short vowel sound.
High Frequency Non-Phonetic Word Errors
Errors included:
1 – Homophone Confusion (‘sum’ for some).
2 – Letter Transposition (‘awnser’ for answer). If Luke had been taught this word the first time around as a Heart Word or Trick Word, he would have orthographically mapped the word this way and only would have had to memorize the ‘w’ after the ‘s’. As you can see, the only letter that does not carry its sound-symbol relationship in this word is the ‘w’, so it carries the ‘heart’ below. All the other letters provide students with the ‘anchors’ needed to phonetically spell this word.
3 – Letter Omissions (‘shold’/’wold’) for should/would). Interestingly, Luke correctly spelled could! Since words are so visually similar (cold/could only differ by 1 letter), it is nearly impossible for children to memorize vast lists of words without understanding the relationships between letters and sounds.
4 – Letter Substitutions (‘colar’ and ‘bein’ for color and been) again due to faulty visual memory.
5 – Classic Confusions of ‘where’ and ‘were’, as well as ‘though’ and ‘thought’. Again, faulty visual memory without useful strategies reared its ugly head.
Steve Graham, Professor of Education at Arizona State University, states that, “until handwriting, spelling, and typing are automatic and accurate, they can interfere with other writing processes as well…. it’s important that we help kids master these kinds of fundamental skills right from the start.”
According to Louisa Moats, spelling is a visible record of a child’s language processing, and gives us a window into what a child understands about word structure and speech sounds, and how we use letters to represent those sounds. That’s why I wrote about Luke’s errors as an example to demonstrate that ‘window’ into what Luke did not understand about word structure, speech sounds, and the use of letters to represent the sounds. I couldn’t agree more.
And what about spell check? Well, spell check only ‘works’ if a student has a fairly high degree of accuracy. That is, if they are about “1 letter off”. Spell check won’t help children if misspellings result in a homophone or another valid word if a letter is omitted, for example ‘country’ spelled as ‘county’. A study authored by Dalton, Winbury and Cobb indicated that students with learning disabilities are only able to correct their work using spell check about 51 to 86 percent of the time. Furthermore, many students have difficulty selecting the correct word from the listing supplied by a spell checker.
Let’s help our children learn how words ‘work’ for both reading and spelling simultaneously. It’s the better way to go and it’s time to move away from that weekly dreaded Spelling Test. We parents (and teachers) would be much better off. Feel free to send me your questions on this topic.