Linguistically informed teaching of spelling: toward a relational approach.
Herrington, Michele Hinton ; Macken-Horarik, Mary
The problem with spelling
In a period when teachers are being required to develop a
'clear, consistent and shared language for talking about
language' (Commonwealth of Australia, 2009, p. 7), close attention
to spelling is essential. But knowledge about how spelling works is
something many teachers lack, especially early-career teachers (Adoniou,
2013). One Australian study has revealed that beginning teachers have a
fragmented knowledge about language that 'lacks depth' (Harper
& Rennie, 2009). Other studies have highlighted serious
'gaps' in beginning teachers' knowledge about language
(Alderson & Hudson, 2013; Commonwealth of Australia, 2005; Helfrich
& Bean, 2011; Meehan & Hammond, 2006; Washburn et al., 2011).
These studies suggest that a capacity to develop knowledge about
language at different levels of choice (text, sentence and word) is
crucial if teachers are to meet the linguistic demands of the national
curriculum (e.g. Derewianka, 2012; Jones & Chen, 2012;
Macken-Horarik, Love & Unsworth, 2011). If teachers rely on
relatively superficial accounts of word-level knowledge, their capacity
to assist learners to reason about the morphological and phonological
aspects of words is also weakened. There are flow-on consequences for
children's ability to reflect on lexical and sub-lexical structure
of words when encoding meaning effectively in writing (i.e. spelling).
Helping children attend to the function of forms within words is a
crucial aspect of spelling pedagogy.
Curriculum materials calling for a multifaceted approach to
spelling are common; these are often promoted under the rubric of a
'balanced approach' to literacy teaching. For example, in New
South Wales, curriculum support directives, such as Focus on Literacy:
Spelling call for 'explicit and systematic' teaching of
spelling based on teacher knowledge about 'how the spelling system
works' (NSW Department of Education and Training, 1998, p. 19).
However, if teachers are to effectively assist children to 'trouble
shoot' words and produce correct spelling, they need secure
foundations in language knowledge. The challenge is to provide teachers
with deep understandings about the relationships that exist between
orthography, phonology and morphology (Adoniou, 2013; Buckland &
Fraser, 2008).
The current paper emerged out of a research study that investigated
precisely this possibility in six primary schools. The approach to
spelling investigated in this study was developed in response to a
demonstrated need to improve the teaching and learning of spelling. The
intention was that children would not only spell words correctly but
also learn to reason about spelling based on powerful
morpho-phonological awareness. The key, we believed, was to provide both
teachers and children with portable knowledge about the sub-lexical
structure of words and thus enable children to tackle unfamiliar words
with secure understandings about morphemes and phonemes. In this way, we
hoped to prepare children for future learning and thus strengthen
transfer of understandings through meaningful code-based instruction
(Bransford & Schwartz, 2001). Above all, this would involve learning
how to map morphological onto phonological knowledge, making meaningful
associations between forms, sounds and graphemes.
Current approaches to spelling instruction
In spite of evidence in support of a functional multifaceted
knowledge of language (e.g. Freebody & Luke, 2003, and earlier,
Wray, Medwell, Fox & Poulson, 2000) teachers tend to approach
spelling as a task of rote memorisation or drill, and this view is
reflected in the use of the dominant spelling strategy Look, Say, Cover,
Write and Check (LSCWC or variations on the theme). This popular
strategy requires students memorise whole words from a thematic list or
common letter string (e.g. fight, bright, light) to create a word list
that becomes a weekly spelling test. Teachers hope that children's
performance in these weekly spelling tests will transfer to other
writing tasks. However, the research reflects what many teachers find in
the classroom--that the memorisation of word lists provides limited
generalisation and transfer of learning to later independent writing
(Beckham-Hungler & Williams, 2003; Bransford & Schwartz, 2001).
Correct spelling is important, but it needs to be built on the back of
understandings of the way the English spelling system works if transfer
is to be successful.
Unfortunately, the LCSWC strategy tends to encourage children to
'look at' (rather than 'look inside') whole words.
In order to do the latter, children need access to knowledge about
morphemes and the important contribution morphemes make to both the form
and meaning of words. If they lack access to this kind of knowledge,
children are forced to remember whole words and cannot use what they
know about morphology in English to tackle the spelling of unfamiliar
words. The National Inquiry into Literacy Teaching (2005) challenged the
effectiveness of 'whole language' approaches and affirmed the
importance of 'code based methods--including an awareness of
phonemes, syllables and morphology' and suggested that 'these
are both foundational and essential skills for the development of
competence in reading, writing and spelling ' (Commonwealth of
Australia, 2005, p. 13, 37). Evidence from recent research also suggests
that even though teaching children about morphemes is found to be
educationally significant, there is little evidence that spelling
programs include morphology as a central aspect of learning to spell
(Moats, 2005/2006; Nunes & Bryant, 2006, 2009). That is, teachers
tend to approach morphology as an ancillary rather than substantive
aspect of spelling knowledge (Carlisle, 2010; Nunes & Bryant, 2006).
Thus opportunities are lost and children are thrown back on their own
resources such as memory, without access to foundational content
knowledge that would enable them to tackle the spelling of words (NSW
Department of Education and Training, 1998).
Morpho-phonological content knowledge is crucial to the meaningful
decoding of words in reading. Furthermore, there is a raft of research
underscoring the importance of word-level knowledge like this in
developing children's literate behaviours (Bahr, Silliman &
Berninger, 2009; Elbro & Arnbak, 1996; Moats, 2005/2006; Nunes &
Bryant 2006, 2009; Singson, Mahony & Mann, 2000; Stahl and Nagy,
2006; Windsor, 2000). What is less well understood is how knowledge of
morphology can assist children to decode words in meaningful ways and
even reason about the spelling of words on the basis of this knowledge.
A child using the LCSWC strategy may in the short term remember the
spellings of words like prints and prince. But it is more important for
the child to understand that, even though these words sound the same, we
write them differently to indicate different meanings. Similarly, it is
important for children to know that words like product and produce are
related because the same morpheme is used to indicate a related meaning,
even though the sound changes. This morphological knowledge assists
children to shift from a dominant sounding-out strategy that causes many
errors, to a deeper understanding of how sound and meaning work together
to form words.
The implication is that unless children can access deeper
understandings of the spelling system, that includes the centrality of
morphology, they may continue to struggle to find the order that exists
in English spelling. The corollary is that if teachers are to support
children to find this order, they need to utilise a strong knowledge of
word meaning and structure to support children's reasoned
inferences about spelling rather than rely on memory alone. This order
is relational. It is based on sound-symbol relations, on the
representation of meanings through morphemes, on word origins and
orthographic conventions as we indicate below. It is also based on
morpheme-to-morpheme relations where common morphemes in written words
give clues to related meanings. Children can make powerful use of all
sources of knowledge about the structure, meaning and spelling of new
words if their teachers can make lexical and sub-lexical knowledge
accessible to them.
Towards a relational approach to teaching spelling
Earlier work by Bowers (2006), Nunes and Bryant (2006) and Ramsden
(2001) demonstrated that teaching children about morphemes is a powerful
teaching tool for spelling instruction. This paved the way for the
distinctive approach informing the current study. Twelve primary
teachers who participated in this doctoral study were taught how to
deliver a relational approach to teaching spelling. The study aimed to
show teachers how to direct young children's attention to the
meaningful structures within words (morphemes), how morphemes relate to
sounds within words, and importantly, how morphemes connect words in
meaningful ways. The project was informed by other studies adopting a
functional approach to literacy education in primary English (Butt,
Feez, Fahey & Spinks, 2012; Christie, 2005, Derewianka, 2012;
Martin, 2009). In particular, it was situated within a stratified model
of language that relates language forms such as morphemes to their
function in words and the patterns of meaning these generate. For
example, the 'ed' morpheme is used to mark past tense in
regular verbs and a consistent pattern of past tense verbs is a
predictable aspect of narratives set in past times. A multilevel
approach to spelling is in keeping with the emphasis of the Australian
curriculum for English, which requires knowledge 'of the structures
and functions of word-and-sentence-level grammar and text patterns and
the connections between them' (ACARA, 2009, p. 7).
In addition to this, the first author extended the work of earlier
spelling research (Arnbak & Elbro, 2000; Bowers, 2006; Nunes, Bryant
& Olsson, 2003). However, this intervention into the teaching of
spelling was not limited to teaching a morphemic analysis of words in
isolation. Rather, an attempt was made here to inspire and support the
teachers prior to the spelling lessons by providing them with the
understandings necessary to make the relationship between phonemes and
morphemes transparent. This pedagogic approach involved teaching
children to identify forms within words that carried meaning (morphemes)
and then learning to map phonemes onto these so that the functional
parts of words could be related to orthography.
The relational approach was designed to support a shift from the
LCSWC strategy (learning whole words by memorisation) to a strategy that
directs children's attention to Look inside the word, Find the
morphemes, Say the sounds, Write the morphemes of the word and finally,
Check the word (all morphemes). In this way, the enriched LFSWC strategy
brought into focus the significance of parts of words, rather than whole
word memorisation. The relational approach thus aimed to inform and
extend teachers' current approaches to spelling instruction. As
will be seen, it encouraged them to knit together children's
concepts about phonemes and morphemes and provide the necessary word
level knowledge children need to produce meaningful spelling.
Words were grouped by common morphemes, for example, words like
native, nature, natural, naturally, naturalistic, nation, national,
nationwide, nationality, all connected by the root morpheme nat--(root
morpheme meaning source, birth or tribe). The approach thus provided a
teaching opportunity to look inside words and find meaningful forms that
connect words that may sound very different. This relational approach
enabled teachers to help children forge connections between knowledge
about phonemes (which they may already have had), and new knowledge
about morphemes. This approach thus established a foundation for
reasoning about spelling based on portable morphemic understandings.
Naturally, practical concerns arise when designing and implementing
a study of this kind. It is essential to know, not just what to teach to
improve children's spelling performance, but how to teach it. How
do teachers merge this necessary morphemic and phonemic knowledge
together? Preliminary investigations suggested that children should be
taught about morphemes explicitly along with other word level knowledge,
and that this would be more effective than teaching about morphemes in
isolation (Devonshire & Fluck, 2010). The first step was to recruit
teachers and then to in-service them in the affordances and application
of the relational approach.
Designing a spelling intervention for rural classrooms
The study was designed to improve the educational outcomes for
rural and regional children which research indicates generally lag
behind those of their metropolitan peers (Green & Reid, 2004). Many
of these teachers need professional development to enhance teaching in
areas such as spelling where so much is left to chance. The schools
selected for this study, the Southern Highlands and Mulwaree District of
New South Wales, had similar lower to middle socio-economic factors that
significantly affected children's learning and expected outcomes.
All teachers interviewed expressed concern about how they might improve
their students' test results on the National Assessment Program for
Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).
The six participating public schools included approximately equal
numbers of boys and girls from Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5, with a total
of 223 students involved. These middle primary school years are vital to
young literacy learners where NAPLAN results often show children get
left behind. This study was conducted in ten mainstream classrooms,
involving their teachers who were an integral part of this
investigation. The ten intervention groups included four composite Year
3/4 classes, one composite Year 4/5 class, one Year 3 class and four
Year 4 classes.
Prior to the intervention, baseline data from children included
tests of children's spelling, a teacher knowledge questionnaire and
interviews and classroom observations that provided vital contextual
information. Children's spelling was assessed using standardised
spelling tests, a specifically designed morphological spelling test and
a morphological production task. Qualitative data collected concurrently
included teacher interviews and reflections, spelling lesson
observations in the classrooms and verbal justification of spelling
choices from individual students.
The design of the study involved a pre-test, intervention and
post-test structure that allowed a measurement of the impact of each
teacher's intervention on children's spelling. Improvements in
spelling performance were interpreted in this study by using
complementary investigative approaches: a comparative analysis of
correct spelling performances using statistical analysis followed by a
more dynamic detailed analysis of approximations to correct spelling
based on morphological knowledge explored in one-to-one interviews.
These two distinct analytical approaches to spelling performance were
pivotal to understanding what children could do. Children's correct
spelling scores alone, whilst important, can only tell part of the
story. As will be seen, detailed investigation of children's
spelling approximations highlighted subtle evidence of changes in
spelling that provide a window on children's thinking about how to
decode and spell words by building morpheme knowledge into their
spelling production.
Initial teacher questionnaires and interviews between teachers and
the researcher were the first steps in this research toward
understanding the factors at play for spelling instruction in the
dynamic classroom context. Interestingly, it appeared that regardless of
the teachers' experience teaching spelling, the time devoted to
spelling instruction, or the use of commercial phonics or whole language
programs, all ten teachers in this study reported lacking confidence in
knowledge about language and were at a loss as to how to improve their
students' spelling performance. Prior to the intervention, these
teachers taught spelling relying primarily on phonics and letter
patterns that omitted, or marginalised, essential information about
morphemes. All the teachers relied on LSCWC strategy as an embedded
daily routine but did so in fairly uninformed ways.
The ten teachers' insufficient explicit morphemic knowledge
meant that they could not operationalise the LCSWC in productive ways.
For example even though all the teachers attested to knowing what
morphological knowledge was and had claimed they had used it regularly
as a support strategy in their spelling lessons, none of these teachers
could correctly identify the correct definition of a morpheme. It was
also clear that these teachers had some morphemic knowledge that was
confined to common prefix and suffix patterns that the first researcher
had shown them, such as the un-in unhappy and the-ness in emptiness, but
crucially, the teachers could not confidently identify affix meanings,
or their functions. For example, only two out of the ten participating
teachers were able to identify the adjectival suffix-al used to
transform the noun nature into natural and only four could correctly use
the possessive apostrophe. Two teachers admitted to never having learnt
to use the possessive apostrophe morpheme and confessed, 'we have
no idea about the possessive apostrophes' and 'could you
please explain how to use the possessive apostrophe when we finish the
questionnaire?' Despite the difficulties the teachers had in
answering the questionnaire every effort was made to make the teachers
feel comfortable with the answers they gave and they were encouraged to
speak freely about their experiences and concerns. The teachers were
also reassured that full assistance would be given after the
questionnaire and throughout the intervention period to develop their
language knowledge. In a number of revealing confessions, eight teachers
admitted to an acute lack of confidence in their knowledge about
language and how to use language knowledge to support their teaching of
spelling. All the teachers required significant training, resources and
support from the researcher to enable them to apply this kind of
knowledge in their various classrooms.
Implementing a relational approach to spelling instruction
A teaching toolkit was developed as a resource to support each
teacher implementing the spelling intervention and shared in one-on-one
sessions between the researcher and teachers. The toolkit included
information about how the structure of words represented both sounds and
meaningful forms, how to identify morphemes and types of morphemes
(affixes, bases and roots), and the meanings and functions of a list of
common morphemes found in many words in the readings of primary school
children (e.g.-ion,-ian,-ness, -ous).
All morphological terminology was defined and made explicit (e.g.
morpheme, phoneme, base, prefix, suffix) to build a shared meta-language
teachers were asked to use later in spelling instruction. Given the
nature of a relational approach, the teachers were also encouraged to
teach children in their classrooms about the sounds and the meaningful
parts of words at the same time. They were asked to use a contrastive
principle in explanations, based on earlier findings in research on
transfer of learning to new domains (e.g. Bransford & Schwartz,
2001). For example, they included morphemes like the comparative
noun-forming suffix -est, and the person noun-forming suffix-ist. Taught
together, these contrasting suffixes adequately illustrate the
morpho-phonemic principle. The suffixes at the end of fattest and
artist, sound the same but are written differently to indicate a
different meaning. Other examples included base words that change their
sound, but preserve the spelling to preserve the meaning (e.g. heal to
health, know to knowledge, mean to meant, or sign to signal and
signature).
An important goal of the intervention content was to assist
children in identifying and learning about the most commonly used
morphemes in written words. It would not have been useful, or practical,
to overload the instruction time with too many affixes, their meanings
and functions (Kirkland & Saunders, 1991). So, the intervention
design incorporated only the most commonly used affixes and roots
(e.g-less,-able, un-, dis-, help, sign) which both highlighted the
morphophonemic principle and had the greatest potential for propelling
the children's learning forward in spelling and other reading
related activities. The key aspects of the intervention that were
distinctive to the relational approach included (1) the identification
of written morphemes (2) learning about the meaning or function of
morphemes (3) and most importantly, making an explicit connection
between the meaningful forms (morphemes) and the way these written forms
sound (phonemes).
Teachers were encouraged to initiate class discussions about a
single word and scaffold children to increased sensitivity to the
significance of morphemes and the role they play in the spelling system.
For example, in one classroom in the study the teacher put the word
remember on the board and expertly guided her class to discover the
three morphemes re mem (b) and er. A conversation, led by the teacher,
facilitated the children's understanding of the meaning, function,
look and sound of each part and how it all came together to create the
word, remember. The children were encouraged to find other words with
the same root morpheme mem meaning 'call to mind'. They were
able to talk about related words like, memory, memorial, remembrance and
memo. The children were able to look inside the word remember and treat
the morphemes as significant indicators of meaning. This teacher had
never looked at words this way before, even though she had said before
the intervention that she had taught morphology for many years as part
of her spelling program.
Close communication and good rapport between researcher and
teachers throughout the study was essential. This included weekly
face-to-face meetings to discuss difficulties, backed up by frequent
emails to individual teachers. When the researcher visited each
classroom to observe the lessons the teacher would often convey worries
and concerns about their ability to deliver the intervention. Most
teachers, for example, requested detailed clarification of terminology
such as, 'Could you tell me again how to explain morphemes?'
or when teachers found a word that was difficult to talk about they
asked questions like, 'How do you justify the spelling of grateful
... what does the root grate mean?' (root morpheme grate-comes from
the Latin root 'grace'). There were many questions like these
that reflected teachers' word level knowledge. One email sent by
the researcher to all the teachers in the study focused on the-ous Latin
suffix that means 'full of'. All the teachers expressed a lack
of confidence teaching this suffix prior to the email, and so were given
examples like adventurous, poisonous and famous. These words were chosen
because the meaningful parts of these words are transparent, and the
sounds on the ends of these words could be compared to other words with
the same end sounds but different spelling patterns. Classroom
discussions around the-ous suffix were particularly interesting because
they highlighted the importance of making connections between the sounds
of this suffix and the form written to convey the intended meaning. For
example, it was noted that some children suggested that
'lettuce' and 'focus' were -ous words, because they
had the same final sound, and this provided an opportune teaching
moment. The continuous conversation developed between teachers and
researcher contributed to the flexible nature of the intervention
toolkit, as it was adapted to individual classrooms, teaching styles and
student needs.
Analysing the impact of the intervention on spelling performance
and reasoning
Teachers participating in this study administered spelling tests
the day before the start of the intervention for the collection of
pre-test data and the day after the end of the ten week intervention for
the collection of post-test data. The researcher analysed both sets with
a dual focus on correct spelling and on spelling approximations which
gave a rich and multifaceted picture of children's developing
understandings of morphophonological structure. Due to the participating
schools' end of school year commitments, long-term impact data
beyond post-testing was not available.
Here we consider results of a Morphological Spelling Test (MST).
The same instrument was delivered pre and post intervention, but the
words in this instrument were not used in the teaching material of the
intervention. The data provided both baseline information collected
before the intervention and impact data collected after the
intervention. The MST was not standardised, but the results were of
particular interest to this study because it was specifically designed
by the researcher to extract information children had about phonemes and
morphemes and how children used this knowledge together to spell words
(e.g. richness, statement, madness, brother's, children's,
opened, emotion, magician, musician, buy).
Analysis of correct spelling on MST pre and posttests was based on
the work of Nunes and Bryant (2006, 2009) where each correctly spelled
morpheme in a word was given one point. In the word magician, for
example, there are two morphemes, magic and ian, so a possible two
points could be awarded for this word. If magic was spelled correctly,
but the ending was not, then only one point would be given. A
statistical analysis was then undertaken producing an average mean,
standard deviation and effect sizes. The spelling approximation analysis
provided valuable qualitative information about the finer changes that
occurred in children's development of morphological knowledge.
Children's sub-lexical ability--the ability to think about
words in terms of component morphemes--was investigated through close
attention to spelling approximations. It also explored children's
reasoning as they justified spelling choices through post-hoc
interviews. Even though correct spelling is the target for efficient and
meaningful writing, correct spelling performance tells us nothing about
how the task was accomplished, or what the finer changes in performance
might look like before the target performance is reached. Nor does it
tell us about what knowledge children draw on to support their
explanations for choices in spelling. Spelling errors, or
approximations, provide a unique opportunity to observe written evidence
of what children might think about to produce the spelling of a word.
Importantly, the analysis of spelling approximations reveals how
children's concepts or ways of thinking about spelling changes
under the influence of linguistically informed teaching.
Spelling approximations are very different from invented spelling,
perhaps more familiar to primary teachers as part of process writing
pedagogy in previous years. Error analyses typically focus on the
ability or inability of children to make sound to letter correspondences
(Henry, 2003; Moats, 1995). Additionally, children's spellings are
often analysed for visual letter-confusion (transposing letters) and for
irregular spelling rules, as well as the identification of legal or
'illegal letter patterns' (Treiman & Bourassa, 2000).
These types of error analyses follow stage models of spelling
development and often highlight either, children's orthographic
knowledge or children's ability to perform appropriate
phoneme-grapheme mappings (Bahr, Silliman & Berninger, 2009).
Spelling analyses that investigate fine-grained development of written
morphological knowledge is rarely addressed. However, building on the
work of Nunes and Bryant (2006, 2009), we identified children's
correct spelling of morphemes and analyse a wide range of morphological
spelling errors, or approximations. This uncovers finer changes in
children's morphological knowledge, provides a window on
understandings they are currently drawing on in spelling and where their
attention needs to be directed elsewhere.
In the current study, spelling approximation analysis focused on
the linguistic nature of the spelling approximations and qualitative
differences that existed between each attempt, pre to post-test. In this
part of the analysis, we were not looking for correct spellings of
phonemes and morphemes, but for a qualitative shift between the
linguistic nature of the spelling approximations in the pre-test and the
corresponding spelling approximations in the post-test. We expected to
see a shift as a result of the intervention from phonologically based
spelling to morphologically based spelling approximations.
The results on the Morphological Spelling Test (focus on
correctness)
The MST was designed to reveal children's morphological
knowledge and required children to spell morphologically complex words.
Paired sample T-Tests were conducted, and for simplicity, individual
class scores are condensed into performance scores for intervention
groups in Table 1.
It is clear from these results that there was a statistically
significant difference between the pre-intervention and
post-intervention results for words in the MST. The difference in scores
before and after the intervention was significant (p<0.001,
Cohen's d = 0.921).
It can be safely concluded from these results that children
improved spelling performance in the MST spelling test completed before
and after a ten-week intervention. However, these results only reflect
the correct score data and to understand the full impact of the
intervention we needed a detailed analysis of the nature of
children's spelling approximations in these tests. This revealed
some significant results.
Spelling approximations (focus on verbal reasoning)
The rather static comparative mean scores described above are a
condensed summary and necessarily present a narrow view of what children
as a group could do with what they knew at a particular point in time.
Our study also investigated qualitative differences in children's
spelling approximations by looking at individual examples of spelling
pre and post-test. Table 2 presents a representative selection of common
approximations children made in the MST, before and after the
intervention.
As the pre-test examples in Table 2 show, poor spellers often
struggled to make accurate sound to letter correspondences. Children
produced spelling approximations in the pretest like, mast (target word:
musician) and samt (target word: statement). These examples highlight
the children's limited ability to make connections between letters,
sounds and meaningful forms in written words. Interestingly, after the
intervention these children were able to produce spelling approximations
like, magitien (target: magician) and stadment (target: statement). Even
if the correct target word was not achieved, it was important to
evaluate the considerable development of spelling knowledge through
these spelling examples. The child who spelled the word samt in the
pretest, and then was able to produce stadment in the post-test had made
significant progress. These spelling approximations revealed the
simultaneous development of morphological and phonemic knowledge, as the
child applied the correct suffix and produced a closer phonemic
representational fit between sounds and letters in the base word. This
suggests a parallel growth, or flow on, into the phonemic dimension of
morpho-phonological development.
Parallel growth in phonemic and morphemic development can be
supported by many spelling approximation examples in the data that were
analysed and compared between pre and post-test, but one particular
sample from the MST is most striking. Table 2, 6a displays the spelling
approximation mginr for the target word magician in the pretest. This
spelling approximation sample suggests this child (Year 3) had extremely
limited phonological and morphological knowledge and this limitation is
likely to indicate this child would struggle profoundly with the
spelling of words. Limited language knowledge was also reflected in this
child's verbal justifications and reasoning about written spelling
forms. When asked to justify a written spelling form this child's,
responses were limited to 'I don't know ... it just looks
right.' This type of verbal response demonstrates a reliance on the
look of the whole word rather than drawing on knowledge about word
structure that includes phonemes and morphemes to assist in reasoning
about spelling choices.
After the 10-week intervention using the relational approach to
develop new ways of thinking and talking about the smaller parts of
words the same child in the example above was able to produce the
spelling approximation murchishin for the target word magician.
Importantly, this child also included some emerging knowledge about
language and was able to draw on this knowledge to justify the written
form, for example, "Cause that's the way it sounds.' This
shows a significant improvement in sound to letter correspondence,
suggesting increased phonemic development. Despite some remaining
difficulties with correct spelling, the child was making a step in the
right direction.
We found further evidence that children use phonological and
morphological knowledge simultaneously to solve the spelling of
difficult words. In Table 2 there are a number of examples where
children have attempted to write the words children's and
brother's. In line 8 for example, a child has written chedens for
the target word children's in the pretest. Even though the target
word was delivered in the context of a sentence by their teachers,
children often ignored the 's unit of meaning, and wrote down the
letters that represented the most salient sounds. After the
intervention, this child was able to write chigrend's. This
spelling approximation is further evidence that even though the child
had not produced the correct spelling of children's in the
post-test he had progressed significantly. Firstly, the child produced a
better representational fit between phonemes and graphemes. Secondly,
the posttest spelling approximations, chigrend's, demonstrates both
the child's developing complex morphological knowledge by using a
base morpheme followed by a possessive apostrophe before the s.
This kind of morpho-phonemic development was evident in many
post-intervention verbal responses. For example, when asked to justify
the spelling of madnes (target word: madness), one child's response
was 'Cause there's the word mad (points to mad in madness) and
that's how it sounds' (points to the--nes). This reasoning is
a clear reminder that teaching spelling must go beyond the teaching of
sounds. What cannot be overlooked in these spelling approximations is
the fact that, following the intervention, struggling spellers were
paying more attention to both phonemes and morphemes and relating these
to each other as they wrote words.
Implications of the study
These findings suggest it is possible to improve the performance of
children's spelling and children's reflections and reasoning
about spelling by teaching children explicitly about the relationship
between phonemes and morphemes, together. Prior to the intervention,
teachers taught spelling strategies in isolation or used strategies in
sequence without showing children how morphemes and phonemes mapped onto
one another. All the teachers in this intervention acknowledged a new
way of seeing the structure of words and how this structure determined
spelling patterns that represented both sounds and meanings. For
example, during the intervention one teacher had had an epiphany, and
declared to the researcher, quoting her own words,
Class! I have something very exciting to teach you
today. In fact it is something I only just learned last
night. After reading my spelling email, I realized that
I had never looked at the word 'unhelpfulness' in this
new way before. (Students were on the edge of their
seats!) I was so excited about this new lesson, that I sat
my husband down and gave him the lesson last night
and my husband was excited too, because he had never
looked at the word 'unhelpfulness' this new way before
either. So I'm going to teach you about this word today.
It was an important moment for this teacher when she was able to
see how the word unhelpfulness was made up of four smaller parts of
meaning. This teacher had never looked at words this way before, even
though she had said before the intervention that she had taught
morphology for many years as part of her spelling program.
The implications for teaching spelling are not only important to
teach children to look closely at the parts of words but for teachers to
look closely and analyse children's errors or spelling
approximations. Morphologically informed scrutiny of spelling
approximations and children's verbal justifications of spelling
forms reveal much about children's thinking. The study confirms and
extends the findings by Nunes and Bryant (2006, 2009) because it not
only identified children's correct spelling of morphemes it
analysed a wide range of children's morphological spelling
approximations that would typically be overlooked. Research has so far
undervalued the importance of children's spelling approximations
and overlooked the wealth of information encoded in them (Henry,
2003/2010; Moats, 2005/2006). The spelling approximations in the current
study revealed that even very poor spellers encoded morphological
knowledge in their spellings and challenges assumptions that poor
spellers fail to encode details of word structure (e.g. Frith, 1980;
Holmes & Ng, 1993; Link & Caramazza, 1994).
Overall, the intervention increased the attention of poor spellers
to the structure of words and effectively improved the quality of their
spelling approximations. In one struggling spellers' pretest, for
example, the spelling approximation renss was created as a
representation for the target word richness. This spelling approximation
reveals a poor representational fit between phonemes, morphemes and
graphemes. After the intervention, this struggling speller was able to
use a better morpho-phonological representational fit, like richnes. In
another pretest example, a child made the spelling approximation keles
for the target word careless. After the intervention this child was able
to write the target word correctly showing this child had made a
significant improvement in morpho-phonemic to grapheme mapping for this
word. If poor spellers attempt to encode the morphological aspects of
words, then perhaps even very young children will benefit from explicit
teaching about morphemes. This is contrary to the models of Frith (1985)
and Ehri (1998, 2005) who propose children only make use of morphemes at
advanced literacy levels (Quemart, Casalis & Duncan, 2012).
The use of a relational approach in this ten week intervention
improved children's ability to treat the smaller meaningful parts
of words as significant and initiate the process of bolting together
morphemic knowledge with their established phonemic knowledge, a kind of
mapping of one concept onto another. The relational approach also
enabled children to recognise the relationship between common morphemes
in words as significant indicators of related meanings that practically
assisted their efforts 'to have a go' at unfamiliar words. It
has been suggested here that linguistically informed support for the
LCSWC memorisation strategy could assist teachers in delivering a
relational approach to teaching spelling in a very practical way. This
proposed informed strategy requires children Look inside the word, Find
the morphemes (inside the word), Say the sounds (inside the word), Write
the word and Check the whole and the parts of the word (LFSWC) offering
a way of focusing children's attention to the sub-lexical aspects
of the word as a matter of routine. Rather than remembering the look of
whole words, the LFSWC strategy assists young literacy learners to
discover the morpho-phonological aspects of written words, which
includes discovering the significance of morphological structures and
how these structures relate to both meaning and sound. In addition, it
is suggested that spelling word lists are created, not based on common
letter strings, but based on common morphemes as a matter of routine
spelling instruction.
The post intervention results also showed that, with instruction
that fosters children's awareness of morphophonological
relationships in written words, children spell, even unfamiliar words,
primarily for meaning. That is not to say children don't need, or
fall back onto, sounding out strategies, but it does perhaps indicate
that children will benefit from learning about higher order skills like
morphemes from an early stage in their literacy learning. This affirms
findings within other studies adopting a functional approach to language
and literacy education. If children can be taught to make use of
form-function-meaning connections in spelling, grammar and even images,
they have access to powerful portable knowledge that can be applied
across contexts (see for example studies using functional grammatics by
Williams (2005), Macken-Horarik et al. (2011) and Macken-Horarik &
Unsworth (2014)).
Of course, teachers can only scaffold portable learning if they
have the necessary understandings about language. As Pellegrino and
Hilton (p. 6-23, 2012) found, 'in observational studies of
cognitive apprenticeship, beginners successfully learn high-level skills
through a process of assisted performance' (Tharp & Gallimore,
1988) in which they are allowed to attempt parts of complex tasks before
they have mastered basic skills. After the intervention, all project
teachers acknowledged a new way of seeing the structure of words and the
ways this structure determined spelling patterns representing both
sounds and meaningful forms. This is an encouraging sign of the value of
'at the elbow' professional learning that builds knowledge
about language and shows how this can be deployed in classroom pedagogy,
thus enriching current approaches to the teaching of spelling.
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Michele Hinton Herrington & Mary Macken-Horarik
University of New England
Michele Hinton Herrington has just completed a PhD at the
University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales. Working as a
private literacy tutor for many years, Michele developed a passion for
helping struggling spellers. The core idea of her thesis focused on a
linguistically informed relational approach to teaching spelling that
supported teachers and students to achieve improved spelling outcomes.
Mary Macken-Horarik is Associate Professor of English and
Mulitliteracies Education in the School of Education at the University
of New England. She worked for several years as a teacher of school
English and has been teaching pre-service English teachers about English
and language since 1996. She has a special interest in systemic
functional linguistics and has just completed a large Discovery project
on grammar and praxis for English teachers.
Table 1. Morphological Spelling Test (MST)
Group N Pre-Mean Pre-SD Post-Mean
Intervention 223 12.05 4.877 13.96
groups
Group Post-SD Gain P Effect
size
Intervention
groups 4.791 1.91 <0.001 0.395
Table 2. Sample of spelling approximations
in MST
Year 3 Pre Test Post Test Target
1. a mast magitien magician
b ontf orplted opened
2.a samt stadment statement
b otme oped opened
c chilters childen's children's
3.a broutheres brother's brother's
b childrenes children's children's
4a. magicition magician magician
b musicition musician musician
5a. stantment statement statement
b musn musicen musician
6.a mginr murchishin magician
b opnl opent opened
c manss madnes madness
7a mussishion musicion musician
8 chedens chigrend's children's
9 keles careless careless
