How Students Learn to Spell: The Progressive Sequence

How can we most effectively teach students how to spell? Luckily we can depend on decades of research into students' cognitive development, which has demonstrated that students learn to spell in a predictable sequence of steps, each new step building on the last.

Thus we can introduce a progressive sequence of letter-sound associations that allows students to systematically master English spellings little by little. At the very earliest stages of learning to spell, once very young students are familiar with letters and letter names or sounds, they begin to spell inventively by using a few consonants to represent a word. Their spellings at this point resemble license plates: "cn u rd"? When reading, the young student recognizes and remembers initial letters more easily than end consonants and middle vowels.

When the student starts to spell correctly, he or she must learn that:

• Every syllable has a vowel letter
• Many sounds are represented with letter combinations
• How we spell a sound depends on its position in a word
• Only certain letters are doubled
• Meaningful word parts are often spelled consistently

As the student continues on in his or her spelling career, that student learns to connect letters to sounds, then syllables, and then finally—usually after 4th grade—to meaning. At this point, the student knows that morphemes are spelled consistently. As the student develops spelling skills throughout high school, that student relies more and more on analogy strategies based on this morphemic consistency.

According to the English-Language Arts Content Standards, the spelling curriculum should progress as follows:

• 1st to 2nd grade: One-syllable words of Anglo-Saxon origin
• 2nd to 3rd grade: Multi-syllabic words that have common syllable patterns
• 4th grade and up: Words with Latin- and Greek-derived morpheme structures

In addition, students should first be taught to spell words with a high degree of regularity those with spelling patterns that can be generalized to many other words. With a good grounding in reliable and generalized spellings, the student will be better able not only to recognize greater numbers of new words, but also to more easily recognize and integrate exception words.

This progression entails explicit teaching of spelling patterns in the following sequence: In addition, simple prefixes and suffixes should be taught starting in 4th grade; each successive grade introduces more complex affixes until, by 8th grade, spelling instruction concentrates on prefixes and suffixes and the changes they make to words.

1st Grade	Single beginning and middle consonants from b to z, including the c in cat and the g in gone Single ending consonants such as b and t Short vowels such as the a in hat
2nd Grade	Ending consonants such as x and ll Beginning and middle blends such as bl Ending blends such as nd Digraphs such as ch Long vowels such as the first e in scene Vowel digraphs such as the oa in boat
3rd Grade	Beginning consonants such as qu Beginning blends such as scr Middle blends such as ntr Digraphs such as wh Silent letters such as the l in talk Vowels such as the y in sky and the oo in boot Diphthongs such as oy R-controlled vowels such as the ar in car
4th Grade	Beginning consonants such as the c in cent and the g in gent Beginning blends such as shr Digraphs such as ch Silent letters such as the w in write and the c in blackberry Double consonants that spell one phoneme, such as the cc in occupy Vowels such as the y in happy and the oo in foot
5th Grade	Ending consonant spellings such as dge Digraphs such as tch Silent letters such as the gn in gnu
6th Grade	Beginning blends such as sch Digraphs such as the ch in ache Vowels such as the schwa (the a in about, the o in lesson, the e in arithmetic)
7th Grade	Vowel spellings such as eigh and the y in system

• Learn more about reading instruction tools that build spelling skills...

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