ABSTRACT
For almost 30 years educational researchers, developmental psychologists, and cognitive psychologists have established a fundamental insight about the role and importance of spelling knowledge: By examining the spellings of their students, teachers are able to gain the most direct information about the students’ underlying word knowledge and how they apply that knowledge in writing and in reading; this in turn enables teachers better to determine the focus of their word-level instruction-both spelling and decoding. With respect to the spelling system itself, over the last several years a number of educators have emphasized what many linguists have pointed out for well over a century: The spelling system of American and British English is far more regular than traditionally assumed. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to explore the implications of and potential for a developmental approach to instruction that is informed by these two fundamental understandings: The regularities of the spelling system and the role of spelling or orthographic knowledge in literacy processes.
