ABSTRACT
Learning to spell, or encode, English words conventionally is a complex process due to its opaque nature; the alphabetic principle does not always have a one-to-one mapping between oral and written sounds/letters. Spelling development during the early years takes place through children’s emergent writing in which they hypothesise about how written language works, try it out, and then retool it toward becoming conventional spellers. During this period, children use scribble, drawing, and letter-like symbols to communicate their written messages before they enter the elementary years in which they use their growing phonics and phonemic awareness knowledge to engage in invented spelling and recognition of high-frequency words and irregularly spelled words. They also apply their knowledge of mental orthographic representations (MORs), or visual imprints of word chunks, such as ‘ing’ and more complex phonics concepts, such as long and short vowels, digraphs, diphthongs, and schwa vowels. As they move into the adolescent years and beyond, individuals’ spelling becomes intrinsically linked with vocabulary as knowledge of word origins bolsters their morphological knowledge of the words they use. Key to this expanded knowledge is how words within specific disciplines may be used and written from a disciplinary literacies perspective. Based on this developmental continuum for spelling, scholars and researchers have pushed spelling instruction forward from the more traditional memorisation of a list of words each week to active word analysis with regard to spelling features, morphology, and knowledge of how the individual syllables in words influence the sounds of the vowels.
