Skill generalisation in teaching spelling to children with learning difficulties

Abstract

A central focus in remedial teaching is the generalisation of responses to contexts in which a student has never been explicitly instructed. Remarkably little is known about how and when generalisation occurs. In this article we examine generalisation effects in the context of spelling. Three areas are discussed: generalisation between spelling and reading, generalisation to untrained sound-letter-correspondences and generalisation to untrained unpredictable words. The research presented indicates both that reading training often leads to spelling improvements and that spelling training leads to reading improvements. There is a tendency for spelling training to be more likely to induce changes in reading than vice versa. In addition, for unpredictable words, generalisation is more likely to occur for words of high frequency and words that are orthographically similar to many other words. We conclude that a better understanding of how generalisation occurs will enable us to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of remedial spelling programmes.

Acknowledgments

This paper is a summary of the findings related to generalisation from the first author's PhD which was awarded Learning Difficulties Australia's Tertiary Student Award in 2009. During the preparation of this paper, Saskia Kohnen was supported by an NHMRC project grant and Lyndsey Nickels by an NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship.

Notes

1. Other important issues in skill generalisation in spelling will not be discussed here. These include generalisation from training of single word spelling to spelling in text, handwriting and morphological principles.

2. It is important to bear in mind that we are drawing on the data of relatively few students and that, ideally, larger scale randomized control trials should be performed to properly test this hypothesis.

3. We acknowledge that regularity or predictability is a gradual rather than a dichotomous concept. This is true on two levels: even within ‘irregular’ words (e.g., yacht), there are usually some letters that are pronounced according to the ‘rules’ (y, t), whereas others are not (ach). Regularity across words is not dichotomous either; there are words that adhere to the most common letter-sound-correspondences (e.g., chart, seat), others that include less common correspondences (e.g., chorus, spread) and then there are words with ‘strange’ or highly uncommon pronunciations (e.g., yacht, great).

4. Another example is that /k/ is spelled ‘ck’ after most short vowels (e.g., lack, peck, tick, sock, buck). Yet another example is the sound /k/ which is spelled as ‘k’ when followed by ‘i’ and ‘e’ (as in ‘king, kiss, kid’ and ‘keg, kelp, kettle’) and as ‘c’ in all other cases. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules.

5. Note that the knowledge sources theory also states that (some) children can deduce letter-sound-correspondences without any explicit phonics teaching. However, for the majority of poor readers/spellers it is probably not the case that they will discover letter-sound-correspondences without any explicit teaching.

6. A ‘match-scheme’ system was applied to compare the target spelling of a word and the participant's misspelling prior to training. A score between 0 and 1 indicated whether the misspelling was very dissimilar to the correct spelling (a score closer to 0) or closely resembled the correct spelling (a score closer to 1).

7. A neighbour of a word is another word that only differs from the first word by one letter. For example, worm has 10 neighbours including warm, form, wore, work; yacht has no neighbours.