Peer‐tutored Cued Spelling with Seven‐to Nine‐year‐olds

Abstract

It is now relatively rare to find a school where parental involvement does not figure in stated policy. Some schools have dabbled for decades in parental involvement in reading, but since 1980 more schools have been looking to refine organisation of their schemes. Techniques have been developed which are not merely watered down versions of traditional teacher practice, such as Paired Reading (Morgan, 1986) and Pause Prompt and Praise (Glynn et al., 1987). This expansion of interest has spilled over into peer tutoring, a method sporadically in and out of fashion over decades but now seen as a powerful educational tool when well organised by professionals (Topping, 1987). Given success of simple, but structured, techniques designed for non-professional use such as Paired Reading, it was clearly desirable to develop a parallel technique applicable to spelling. Thus Cued Spelling procedure was designed. The assumption that children predominantly use visual information in spelling irregular words and auditory information in spelling regular words was disproved by Turner & Quinn (1986), who studied spelling behaviour of 100 boys aged 7-11 years. These workers found that younger children tended to rely on auditory information irrespective of nature of word, while for older children visual information produced better results. The authors conclude: the learner must draw on several strategies... no single strategy can be used to overcome all irregularities in written English. Spellers can therefore be presumed to manipulate phonetic, visual, syntactic and semantic aspects of a word idiosyncratically. The suggestion that students be permitted to select their own spelling words as a means of improving motivation and accommodating to individual learning styles has become more common. Michael (1986) reports that when pupils were allowed to select their own spelling lists, self-selected words were longer and more complicated than those previously presented by teacher, but were nevertheless retained to same degree. Scruggs and his co-workers carried out a series of studies on mnemonic strategies (e.g. Scruggs & Laufenberg, 1986), and emphasised importance of transforming stimuli into more meaningful representations 63