ABSTRACT
Having been given the opportunity to write a short chapter about spelling acquisition in English, we are pleased to report that this task is now near to impossible. The reason we are happy is that, in the past, the field of spelling suffered from a dearth of research. There was much more work on the acquisition of reading and word recognition than on the acquisition of writing and spelling. However, the body of research on spelling in Englishspeaking children is now so large that it would be foolish to presume to do it justice within a single chapter. Given this limitation, we chose three main topics for discussion. These are the use of letter names as an entry into the writing system, young children’s knowledge of the orthographic patterns of their language, and children’s use of morphological strategies to guide their spelling. We chose these three topics because each plays a major role in existing theories of spelling development. We review experimental evidence to suggest that young spellers have more knowledge in each of these areas than portrayed by existing theories. Children’s knowledge, we argue, provides a foundation for the development of spelling skills.
