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Children's written and oral spelling

For adults, written spelling is generally superior to oral spelling. To determine whether the same holds true for children in kindergarten through second grade, we compared children’s ability to spell real words (Experiment 1) and nonsense words (Experiment 2) orally and in writing. Building on the work of Tangel and Blachman (1992, 1995) and others, we developed a reliable system to assess the overall quality of the children’s spellings. We also examined the phonological and orthographic legality of the spellings. By first and second grade, written spellings were superior to oral spellings in both overall quality and representation of phonological form. This held true for both words and nonwords. The results suggest that children, like adults, more accurately analyze the linguistic structure of a spoken item when they can represent the results in a lasting, visible form than when they cannot. Historically, research on spelling has lagged behind research on reading. The gap has narrowed somewhat in recent years with studies that have described the course of spelling development in English and other languages (e.g., Perfetti, Rieben, & Fayol, 1997) and studies that have examined the effects of phonemic analysis instruction on spelling achievement (e.g., Tangel & Blachman, 1992, 1995). However, we still know less about how children learn to spell than about how they learn to read. The present study was designed to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge about spelling. We sought to provide information that would add to our theoretical understanding of the spelling process and, more practically, that could be used in the design and scoring of spelling tests for children. In most classroom spelling tests and in all standardized spelling tests of which we are aware, children’s spellings are scored simply as correct or incorrect. However, research on emergent spelling (e.g., Henderson & Beers, 1980; Read, 1986; Treiman, 1993) has revealed large differences within young children’s incorrect spellings. Stage theories of spelling development (e.g., Ehri, 1986; Gentry, 1982; Henderson & Beers, 1980) explain these differences by postulating that children go through a series of qualitatively different stages during the course of learning to spell. The earliest spellings bear no relationship to the