Why Spelling Is Crucial for Reading

From the English-orthography-in-a-nutshell description above, it is clear that not only is good spelling essential for recognizing words, good spelling is critical for decoding meaning from the plethora of English words that don't adhere to strict phonetic rules. Students who work at increasing their familiarity with spelling patterns are well on their way to developing automatic word recognition.

Good spelling and word recognition skills then combine to allow the skilled reader to recognize new words based on their morphemes—the smallest word element that changes a word's meaning—which is the primary way the student expands his or her vocabulary in 3rd grade and beyond. And in fact, the quality and accuracy of a student's spelling in kindergarten and 1st grade is a predictor of later reading ability. To see why spelling is so important, let's look at where it falls in the progression of reading skills.

Once the student has mastered phonemic awareness, that student must learn not only the basic letter-sound correspondences, but also must begin to map the variety of spellings onto their sounds and vice versa. When the student reaches the point where he or she is practicing word recognition skills, that student must be able to spell reliably in order to work toward automatic word recognition. And, of course, only good spelling will allow the student to start recognizing morphemes—which will, in turn, allow the student to grasp the connections between words and thus decode even more words. A student who can recognize the spelling of 'nation' in 'national' will realize that the words are related and will more easily make the connection between the related meanings. As the student progresses, the ability to spell and recognize derivations will allow him or her to make complex associations, such as between words like 'viable' and 'vivacious.'

Once students can automatically recognize enough words, they can advance to the next step: reading sentences and paragraphs fluently, which allows them to hone their skills in defining and interpreting written words and then using reasoning and other strategies to comprehend written text. As students read and increase their vocabulary, they will understand more and more of the complexities of the English spelling and writing system, which then allows them to increase their vocabulary even more, which encourages even more reading, which exposes them to more complexities...

Thus spelling is an important step on the way to automatic word recognition and, ultimately, comprehension. If the student does not work at good spelling and letter-sound correspondence skills, that student will have trouble recognizing words quickly enough to completely comprehend the text.