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Home > Reading Topics A-Z > Putting Spelling in Perspective

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Putting Spelling in Perspective

There are about 400,000 words in a dictionary. Only 13 percent of these words are truly exceptional, in that they must be memorized by sight.

In about 50 percent of these words, sound and letter associations connect perfectly. These words don't have to be memorized. The remaining 37 percent are easily learned through instruction of letter-sound correspondences.

It is these last two categories from which 90 percent of written English words derive and where students can learn to understand spelling principles and patterns.

Spelling instruction should include:

• Alphabetic principle

  knowledge of which individual letters match up to sounds, in a left to right sequence (In the word cup each sound is represented by a single letter).

• Pattern information

  which groups of letters function as a pattern to represent sounds (Examples of patterns would include: CVC (Consonant/Vowel/Consonant) pattern to form short vowels (e.g. like the word cat) or CVCe/CVVC patterns to form long vowels (e.g. like the words same or meat).

• Meaning information

  which groups of letters represent the meaning (The prefix re- as in redo, means to do again).