Traditional spelling programs used in schools for nearly 100 years consist of lists of words presented weekly with a pretest on Monday, various activities through the week, and a final test on Friday. Every six weeks there may be a review test. Considering that each lesson may include 20-25 words, an entire year's spelling program may present approximately 600-750 words. Perhaps a quarter of the students probably know how to spell these words in the first place and another quarter may forget the spellings after the final test. This is not an efficient way to teach spelling. However, habits are hard to break. In many cases, spelling remains a separate subject which many parents appreciate because it is an area in which they can drill their children at home.
It's time to find a better way. Much of the spelling research was done in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Researchers looked at ways in which children progressed as they began to write words with spellings they invented as they attached letters to the sounds they wanted to convey, essentially using their inate concepts of phonics. Researchers determined that children learn short vowel spellings first, then proceed to long vowels, consonant blends, and more complex spellings. Some thought the ideal way to teach the sounds was through sorting words according to patterns.
While phonics as a subject was returning as a school subject in the later 1900s, in many cases it, too, is being taught in isolation. Some teachers have tried to teach it through analyzing words in the reading process but provide no structure for an systematic presentation of phonics elements. Not many teachers completely understand how to teach the subject. Phonics workbooks contain pictures and children are asked to write a letter representing the beginning or ending sound of the picture word. Even the pictures can be confusing (man or dad?) so much teacher time can be spent simply interpreting the pictures. There are few programs that require writing the full words and these are expensive.
Most of the best phonics programs I found were created by teachers in isolated settings who attempted to market them through personal contacts and conferences. As I encountered these and tried many of them in my classroom, I began to see greater reading success with my students. Each of them, though, had elements that, while at the beginning were exciting, became a bit cumbersome and I felt could be eliminated. And so The Spel-Lang Tree: Roots was born, borrowing and transforming the best elements from many good programs, embedding phonics in spelling lessons. This involved dictating patterned words, 24 per day, and having the children write them. By providing immediate feedback, children learned by self-correcting their work. My classroom research confirmed my methods. This has been further verified by spelling research that has been done since that time. In The Spel-Lang Tree: Roots, instead of 600 words per year, first grade students encounter around 2,000 words, with some short vowel words consisting of 7 and 8 letters (i.e., stretch, strength), as they learn the spelling system. This broad vocabulary expansion has a direct effect on reading comprehension. Imagine the pride these children take in their success!
In more recent years more spelling experiments have been done by university researchers. One study compared a group of children who were taught to spell words they had practiced reading and another group who read words they had practiced spelling. Both groups made gains. However, this study confirmed what others have also found, the transfer from spelling to reading is greater than transfer from reading to spelling. It is recommended that reading and spelling curricula should be coordinated to achieve maximum benefits for children. The students who received additional handwriting and spelling instruction made greater gains in handwriting fluency, handwriting legibility, and spelling accuracy. They also had greater gains in sentence construction and composition vocabulary. This study demonstrated that explicit and supplemental handwriting and spelling instruction can play an important role in reading development. Such research also points out that handwriting, phonics, spelling, word reading, and reading comprehension are all interrelated and should be taught together.