If you’re wondering why you need to start this course with a second history lesson, you’re probably not alone.  Many people who take this course will feel the same. However, there is something important to discuss when teaching spelling. We need to ask ourselves, should the spelling tutor decide which method is best for the individual child? Or, should the child’s spelling performance indicate which method is the best fit for that individual child? We can only really engage with these questions by looking at how spelling has been taught through history and ask ourselves is there a one size fits all best way.

Throughout the history of teaching spelling, learning to spell has been taught to struggling spellers in a blanket way; a one size fits all approach. Maybe that is the right way, maybe it’s not. However, the fact that children still to this very day struggle with learning to spell suggests that this one size fits all approach isn’t the best solution.

From 1450, something called a Hornbook was used in schools to teach children how to spell. It was the first type of alphabetic teaching method. Children would hold the Hornbook (or the teacher would) then begin the process of learning all of its content by rote in the following order:

• Naming the letters
• Sounds of vowels
• Punctuation marks
• Syllable sounds.

The teacher would require a class of 50 (sometimes more) children to recite the meaningless letter patterns on the Hornbook. They would have to recite forwards and backwards until they were perfect. Any imperfections or misremembering would often be punished with corporal punishment. Children learned to recite and spell the Lord’s prayer and then moved on to the words within the bible. We can see that children were meant to (and some must-have) learnt the letters and words they were given and been able to apply these letter patterns to new words. Somehow, children mastered the English writing system this way.

 

In 1770, the Hornbook was replaced by Battledores. These were pieces of paper that could be folded into three sections, similar to some of the pamphlet folds we have today. You can see they are still based on the alphabet method of instruction and rote learning, but the Battledores began the link between letters, words and visual images.

At the beginning of the 19th-century, spelling instruction built upon the alphabet method and started including how to blend the alphabet and syllable sounds. In 1820, Mrs Trimmer wrote a book that encouraged and instructed on this blending technique. However, it was still rote learning, drilling down the letter sounds and syllables until they were memorised. Another additional change introduced by Mrs Trimmer was being taught to aid word recognition by a ‘whole-word’ reading approach for short words. At this time, spelling was only taught after children learnt to read.

Later in the 19th century, more phonics and rule-based methods came in. The focus was put on the sounds of the words, specifically the first two letters of the word. Guessing was encouraged based on this starting sound. Breaking words into single phonics was also popular (e.g c-a-t). It’s important to note the ABC alphabet method was still being used as the main approach. Additionally in the 19th century, children began to learn to read and spell at the same time.

In the 1930 and 1940’s the ‘look and say’ reading and spelling method became popular. Children were taught to learn words as whole units instead of breaking them down into sounds, often with an accompanying picture.  New words were introduced by letting the child see the word, hear the word and either having a pre-existing drawing of the word or making a drawing themselves.

Children were expected to learn 50 new words this way, but this increased to 200 new words in the first few years of primary school. Spelling was mastered by copying. This copying method was named ‘look, copy and write’.  Phonics was pushed aside in many schools. Although, some rules and explanations such as the magic e and i before c were used, but not much else.

Advantages

• Recognising whole words creates fluent readers. Even phonic based instruction needs to achieve whole word recognition for fluency.
• Children learn non-regular phonetic words easier which are commonly found in high-frequency words.
• It’s an easy teaching method to grasp and parents can be involved.
• Children often learned faster using the look and say method but slowed down considerably when words got more complex.

Disadvantages 

• In many cases, children will struggle to read unfamiliar words.
• Books have to be carefully chosen to match the words already learnt.
• It requires the child to have a greater vocabulary to read and spell fluently.

In the 1970s, Frank Smith influenced teaching by introducing the whole word reading methods. This is where words were guessed in context using pictures, semantics and syntactic cues. There was a greater focus on the meaning of the words. This is called ‘top-down processing.’

What is top-down and bottom-up processing?

Top-down and bottom-up processing is how psychologists try to understand the relationship between perception and cognition (understanding and what we do). 

Through our five senses; sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell we get bits of information about the world around us in the form of signals, and these signals go to our brains for us to make sense of. This is a very basic form of perception. 

Bottom-up processing

Bottom-up processing is where the information we take in through our senses comes in as raw meaningless data, it gets brought into our brains through our eyes or other senses, then it gets made sense of inside our minds. If we take spelling using phonics as an example, the 44 sounds known as phonemes are meaningless on their own, they are raw data to many children. This data comes in through the eyes and activates the long-term memory of the sounds and how they work, so the phonemes become pieced together to trigger words and meanings which are already stored in the child’s knowledge.  Whilst it is far more complicated than this, we can get an understanding of this bottom-up process. The information is coming up to the mind to be made sense of.

Top-down processing

Top-down processing is the other way round. If we take reading as an example, the letters and symbols on the page cannot be read by meaningless chunks of data such as graphemes. Instead, past knowledge (words known) experiences and other stored memory parts, comes down from the mind and makes sense of what is being seen on the page. Stored knowledge comes down to make sense of what is being seen. 

If you work with a child who looks at a word and names it as something completely unrelated. for example the word ‘when’ being read as ‘horse‘, for example, this could be a sign of top-down processing.

“**hen I know that word, it’s one of those animals… that live in that place. Yes me and mum read a book about it. I can see the page, there was a picture of a girl and yes there’s a horse. Thats the word! The word is Horse!”

This process from getting from the when to the word horse was due to perception noticing the ‘hen’ part, associating it with a farm and them the experience of reading a book with mum recently about a girl who lived on a farm and who had a horse. However, the route from when to horse will have been instant with no actual conscious thinking.  It is a top-down process but it is incorrect as the prior knowledge needed was not solid yet, so the wrong information came down. 

As a spelling tutor, it helps if you can recognise this top-down process causing some difficulty and either strengthen the bottom-up process; by trying to encourage phonemic awareness or strengthen the top-down down process by using the senses and creating a memorable experience of the words. 

It is well known that children and adults with dyslexia struggle to rote learn and make sense of information that has no meaning to them. Many psychologists argue that people with dyslexia require a top-down method of processing to make sense of new information. 

By 1981, only a few teachers were teaching letter strings in the classroom. Spelling was an activity that was taught at the same time as reading and mainly used the look, cover, write system. Many children were encouraged to guess the spellings using the initial sound only.

However, in 1989, the National Curriculum was forged and with its 5 new levels, teachers and schools were given standardisation and guidelines. Importantly for our discussion, these new targets and levels were measurable. The use of phonics as the main literacy teaching tool was recommended.

The levels as described by Montgomery (2007) were as follows:

Level 1:

• Begin to demonstrate an understanding of the difference between drawing and writing.
• Write some letter shapes in response to sounds.
• Using single or pairs of letters to represent a whole word.

Level 2: (7 years olds, key Stage 1)

• Produce words that can be recognized (not necessarily correct)
• Understand that spelling has patterns and begin to demonstrate those patterns while trying a range of words.
• Spell correctly words that use common patterns and that are used regularly.

Level 3:

• Spell correctly less common words that need to be used in certain contexts, such as scientific words and mathematical words.
• Showing a growing awareness of word families and their relationships.
• Self-checking their own writing and correcting mistakes.
• Recognise and use correctly common letter strings and regular patterns for vowel sounds.

Level 4: ( 11-year-olds, Key Stage 2)

• Spell words correctly that show other main spelling patterns in English including Prefixes and Suffixes.
• Spell correctly words of some complexity including words with ineffectual suffixes (e.g -ed and -ing), consonant doubling, and words which highlight semantic relationships (e.g sign and signature).

Montgomery, D., 2007. Spelling, Handwriting And Dyslexia. Oxon: Routledge, pp.16-17.

Over the next 17 years, these levels and targets enabled children, teachers and schools to be measured. In 1998, there was a huge national concern in regard to literacy teaching and literacy attainment for 11-year-olds. This concern was still present in 2005, which caused a House of Commons Inquiry to investigate literacy shortcomings and the previous National Literacy Strategy. This inquiry has huge implications for literacy teaching. It concluded that the Synthetic Phonic approach to reading and spelling was to be the only teaching system to be used in schools. This synthetic phonic approach became mandatory for all schools.

Phonics is still the main teaching tool used in schools at the time of writing this course (2021).  Literacy levels have improved in many schools, however, there are still groups of children who are not able to attain literacy. Even with extra phonic based tuition, they remain struggling spellers. These are the children whose parents often seek tuition. This particular course will not engage in the phonic debate, we will do this in higher-level spelling courses. However, this course will not teach phonics. Instead, it will strengthen your understanding of and give you tools to support top-down processing in regard to spelling tuition.

This course will encourage you to be curious about your students and how they spell. Not just how they spell words correctly, but how they make the mistakes they make and encourage you to be curious about these mistakes. Sometimes looking deeply into spelling errors leads you towards the solutions to faster improvements.

Importantly, this course isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach which mainstream classroom education is forced to take. Through working on a one to one basis or even in small groups (up to three) you should be able to alter your spelling tuition to suit your student’s needs. This is why this course is a tool kit, it’s not titled ‘The best way to teach children how to spell’. This course accepts there are multiple ways to unlock spelling, and some children will be suited to different methods.