Invented Spelling

Learning to spell English words is a cultural milestone requiring considerable fine-tuned metacognitive, meta linguistic, and higher-order thinking, particularly analysis and synthesis. From 26 letters we spell hundreds of thousands of words. If students had to memorize single strings of letters as separate, random items, the task of memorizing spellings would be more daunting than the intellectual task of generating them, more suited to artificial than to human intelligence.

The orthographic system in American English is located in society and gets internalized individually through writing and reading experiences. It operates according to particles, principles and patterns, not through memorized unique letter configurations—‘human’ becomes ‘humane’ through the final silent ‘e’ (a rule) which changes the schwa ‘a’ in human to a mid-open-back vowel in humane, changing the syllabic stress (a pattern). This is spelling system knowledge.

You don’t have to know a schwa from a back vowel consciously—children needn’t be linguists to learn to spell—but the ability to apply tacit knowledge of the orthographic system during the generative act is crucial. So what is the epistemology of spelling? How do preschool children build knowledge of the system to become spellers by third grade?

They write, for one thing. They take tries at spellings, come as close as they can, in the writing moment when an idea is taking shape in language. The secret of learning to spell is in the trying.

Lucy Calkins in her seminal book The Art of Teaching Writing cautioned K-3 grade teachers to be sensitive to the disappearance of the cloak of egocentricity during this learning spelling period. Young children happily write, self-absorbed in school play, shielded by egocentricity. Whether a word is spelled conventionally or even spelled at all isn’t all that important.

Calkins observed that between mid-first and early-second grade, children face writer’s block simply because they are no longer willing to try to spell. Once the cloak is gone, once the insight dawns that there is a way a word ought to be spelled, spelling can inspire fear of writing as a source of embarrassment and frustration.

Research in composition theory from classical rhetoric to cognitive and sociocultural accounts have highlighted the significance of developing a sense of audience through authentic experiences in the growth of competent writers. Publication is the motive that drives writing and its improvement—legitimate contact with readers. Publication norms require conventional orthography.

Publication is the motive that drives spelling improvement. Donald Graves called publishing the engine of the writing classroom and argued that young children need to write and publish frequently.

The tension between composition and publication vis a vis spelling is strong: Children take tries at invented spellings to compose, learning both to compose and to spell, but how do they get all the spellings ready to publish?

If a child learning to spell had no help making publishable copy, that child would never normatively publish. The teacher’s job is to support children’s learning during invention of spellings. The very young child works until the substance of the text is recorded as fully as the child is capable. A teacher with a blue pencil then edits spelling on a penultimate draft before the child publishes a piece on a bulletin board or a storybook in a classroom library. Publication materials and processes are essential curricular materials and routines.

The older writer learns to use resources to identify conventional spellings before publication and collaborates as a proof reader for peers, co-creating knowledge of orthography.

Knowing the importance of alphabetic knowledge for both decoding and spelling, I started teaching the alphabet to my daughter, Karen, the day she was born. Three hours after she made her entrance, I found myself sitting in a rocker, holding her, feeding her a first bottle. As she sucked greedily at the formula, I sang the alphabet song softly in her ear. Every day during the coming months I sang the alphabet song to her.

At some point I heard remnants of the song’s melody in her humming and babbling. She was able to sing the song on her own around 14 months—lmnop came out pretty free form, but she had a solid auditory track in memory. My objective was to help her learn to say the name for each letter in the alphabet.

Soon we would tackle the visual shapes. Knowing letter names by voice and pointing to letters by gesture when asked or at will is prerequisite to spelling. Karen played for hours with a wooden puzzle with capital letters that fit into recesses for each letter shape. Inside the recesses were images representing words which begin with that letter’s sound—a carrot for ‘c,’ a tiger for ‘t.’

She picked out the M for me when she asked for milk or an M&M, the P when she would like to sit at the piano. Writing letters without trying to manipulate a pencil was accomplished through a toy screen she could write on with her index finger and then erase with a dial. By three years old she was writing short messages on the toy screen.

The genius of the alphabet is the presence of a sound associated with the visual letter within the spoken name of the letter—Zee has two sounds in its spoken name (/z/ and /ee/). Knowing the letter name brings with it the phoneme /z/. A child who knows to name the letter k (Kay) and can scribe the letter has almost all she needs to invent ‘kt’ for ‘cat.’

Invented spellings are written words spelled using the writer’s current, if incomplete, knowledge of the orthography. In a sense, every time you spell a word, you invent the spelling at lightning speed, pulling together patterns of sounds and letters, applying rules, often morphemes and affixes as well. Sometimes a nagging doubt sends you to check.

I’ve known elementary teachers over the years who capitalized on the possibilities of invented or temporary spelling as a primary and intermediate grade strategy to encourage writing with less stress and to foster meta linguistic awareness that customizes internal spelling generators. Choosing a word for its aptness, its clarity, its humor—these are good compositional reasons. Choosing it because you can spell it—maybe not.

One strategy I’ve used in my own teaching practice across grades 1-6 as a writing demonstration teacher I called ‘take a try.’ You don’t know how to spell chocolate? Take a try. Say it a few times. Listen for letters alone and in combination.

Write down the letters you hear. How does the word start? When you collect some letters into a spelling, put it aside and ask a peer in class or a sibling at home to take a try. Before publishing, find out the conventional spelling. Keep records in your personal spelling dictionary.

I came across a website named Very Well Family¹ pitched toward parents on the fence regarding invented spelling. It is easy to understand how a parent might have questions about a teacher who encourages inventing spelling. But…

Alameida, Silva, and Rosa (2021)² published findings from a recent experiment in invented spelling with a control group and two treatment groups, looking at alternate teaching strategies to mediate learning during invented spelling events over a course of sixteen 15-20 minute one-on-one sessions between preschoolers and a psychologist.

Each session for each group began with the psychologist asking the preschooler to invent the spellings for common words, e.g., ‘pear.’ The psychologist then varied the strategy by condition. In the control group the psychologist asked the child to draw a picture for each word. There was no real mediation for spelling.

In the treatment groups the psychologist asked the preschooler to consider a spelling made by “another child” in a different class (both treatment A and B). The “other child” spelling was actually prepared by the psychologist to be just a bit more sophisticated, perhaps with an additional letter, than the experimental subject’s spelling.

Here, the instructional treatments diverged. In the explicit instruction group, the teacher pointed out the differences between the “other child” spelling and the subject’s spelling and verbalized why the “other child” spelling was better. In the implicit instruction group the teacher engaged the child in search behavior, analysis, and judgment.

Here is a screenshot from the study of an example protocol used in the implicit instruction treatment, the treatment showing the greatest promise of improving systemic spelling knowledge:

Mediation whether implicit or explicit worked better than the control condition. Significant positive differences between post test means comparing the implicit and explicit groups on measures of phonemic awareness and phoneticization were found favoring implicit instruction above explicit and control group performances.

As the authors note, letter recognition and letter name knowledge alone may not lead to progress toward constructing spelling system knowledge for all children. To construct orthographic knowledge, children must scrutinize and compare variant invented spellings (their own and the “other child’s” spelling), thinking for themselves rather than listening to a teacher explain. The discussion section references a handful of recent studies in the literature that support a deeper look into implicit invented spelling sessions extending to third grade.

1. https://www.verywellfamily.com/

2. Análise Psicológica (2021), 2 (XXXIX): 229-245 doi: 10.14417/ap.1848

Invented spelling intervention programmes: Comparing explicit and implicit instructions

Tiago Almeida* / Cristina Silva** / João Rosa*