Orthographic Similarity and Phonological Transparency in Spelling.

Abstract

In a brief, exploratoryspelling intervention, second through fourthgrade students, divided in two groups of 70students, learned to spell Latin loan wordsthat ended in -ion with either alinguistically explicit or implicit method. The -ion words were chosen because theypossess similar orthographic structure inaddition to uniform pronunciation. In theexplicit instruction, linguistic andorthographic properties of the words weresimultaneously considered and non-overlappingdistributive patterns between sound andspelling were discussed, whereas in theimplicit instruction discussion was limited tothe orthographic pattern. The explicitinstruction was based on the Orton–Gillinghammethod. Linguistically explicit instructionimproved discrimination of /zh/ and /sh/sounds, spelling of word endings tion andsion and, most importantly, spellinggeneralization to novel words over implicitinstruction. These results were consistent pergrade. The children in each instructionimproved equally on spelling of the stressedvowel, which did not receive explicit attentionin the intervention, as well as on reading ofboth the stressed vowel and the word endings. Thus, the effectiveness of drawing explicitversus implicit attention was shown across andwithin type of instruction. The results appearto support sound-based spelling instruction.