More than spelling accuracy

Abstract

Spelling is a linguistic process that integrates phonological, orthographic, and morphological knowledge into novel word forms. Regardless of language, students learn to identify meaningful sound/letter combinations as they learn how to spell. However, most spelling investigations only consider overall word accuracy and not the nature and number of linguistic features in error. This chapter illustrates the utility of a linguistic scoring procedure in documenting the nature of misspelling patterns longitudinally in two groups of students from grades 1–7 that varied by spelling ability. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of misspellings demonstrate how general word knowledge develops into specific word knowledge for spelling. This type of fine-grained linguistic analysis is useful in studying spelling skill in any alphabetic or alphasyllabary language.