Word familiarity and spelling difficulty

Summary

Experts in spelling instruction commonly have expressed the belief that children's familiarity with words and their ability to spell them are closely related. The findings of two studies of this relationship, presented to follow, question this assumption. Correlations obtained between children's familiarity with words and their abilities to spell them were found to be too low to have any value for predictive purposes. These findings suggest that learning to read and learning to spell are significantly different, and that systematic instruction in spelling therefore must attend to factors other than word familiarity.