The teaching of spelling

Abstract

There are three major problems connected with the teaching of spelling. These may be stated as follows: What words should children learn to spell ? When should these words be taught? And how should they be taught? Educational philosophy has answered the first problem with the simple statement that children should be taught to spell those words which they use frequently in writing. A further answer is also given by stating that they should learn also to spell any additional common words which adults use frequently in writing. Two points of view are carried in the above statements, and the results of these are seen in the research dealing with word studies. One group of workers relies largely on childhood vocabulary studies for its lists of spelling words. The other makes use of word counts of adult writing. Most of the recent texts make use of both types of materials. The results of research show pretty definitely what words children in general use frequently in their writing. The written vocabularies of adults have been studied even more extensively. There are several major studies and a number of minor ones dealing with the written vocabularies of children. Only the four most extensive ones are mentioned here. One of the earliest was reported by Jones' who claims to have counted the words in a little over 75,000 themes written by grade children. The total number of words in the themes, counting each word as many times as it appeared, was stated as approximately 15,000,000. Only 4,523 different words were reported found in this study. Supt. Bauer2 in the New Orleans study of approximately 2,500,000 running words taken from children's themes found approximately 19,000 different words. From this study a list of 3,037 frequently occurring words were selected as a spelling list. Tidyman3 studied 538,500 running words taken from 50,000 themes. After omitting all words of one and two letters, a large number of common words, and words of very low frequency, he derived a list of 3,850 words. In an investigation4 involving approximately 2,174,820 running words taken almost equally from themes and letters written by children in grades