In fact, one study reported that spell checkers usually catch just 30 to 80 percent of misspellings overall (partly because they miss errors like here vs. Students who are very poor spellers do not produce the close approximations of target words necessary for the spell checker to suggest the right word. It’s true that spell checkers work reasonably well for those of us who can spell reasonably well - but rudimentary spelling skills are insufficient to use a spell checker. Poor spellers may restrict what they write to words they can spell, with inevitable loss of verbal power, or they may lose track of their thoughts when they get stuck trying to spell a word.īut what about spell check? Since the advent of word processing and spell checkers, some educators have argued that spelling instruction is unnecessary. Even more than reading, writing is a mental juggling act that depends on automatic deployment of basic skills such as handwriting, spelling, grammar, and punctuation so that the writer can keep track of such concerns as topic, organization, word choice, and audience needs. Research also bears out a strong relationship between spelling and writing: Writers who must think too hard about how to spell use up valuable cognitive resources needed for higher level aspects of composition. Learning to spell requires instruction and gradual integration of information about print, speech sounds, and meaning - these, in turn, support memory for whole words, which is used in both spelling and sight reading. Because words are not very visually distinctive (for example, car, can, cane), it is impossible for children to memorize more than a few dozen words unless they have developed insights into how letters and sounds correspond. automatically) rests on the ability to map letters and letter combinations to sounds. Knowing the spelling of a word makes the representation of it sturdy and accessible for fluent reading.” In fact, Ehri and Snowling found that the ability to read words “by sight” (i.e. summarize the real importance of spelling for reading as follows: “Spelling and reading build and rely on the same mental representation of a word. Nevertheless, research has shown that learning to spell and learning to read rely on much of the same underlying knowledge - such as the relationships between letters and sounds - and, not surprisingly, that spelling instruction can be designed to help children better understand that key knowledge, resulting in better reading. State writing tests may not even score children on spelling accuracy, as they prefer to lump it in with other “mechanical” skills in the scoring rubrics. Few state standards specify what, exactly, a student at each grade level should be able to spell, and most subsume spelling under broad topics such as written composition and language proficiency. Many children have trouble spelling, but we do not know how many, or in relation to what standard, because state accountability assessments seldom include a direct measure of spelling competence. Our society expects that any educated person can spell, yet literate adults commonly characterize themselves as poor spellers and make spelling mistakes. And why it is more regular and predictable than you may think
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