"Poor" spellers tend to use phonological cues and don't proofread effectively

"Poor" spellers, when asked to spell a word, tend to respond first with an emotional/kinesthetic "response" - feeling uncomfortable, looking down or embarrassed, saying ''I'm not a good speller" or "Don't ask me, I never could spell." When they do attempt to spell they tend to try to sound out words (Dilts, 1988) and do not exhibit an awareness of their strategies. Overreliance on rules about sound/symbol relationships and/or a lack of this knowledge (Anderson, 1985; Bruce & Cox, 1983) is characteristic of their strategy and has limited their spelling development. Some poor spellers do use visual information - they can recognize when a word is incorrectly spelled - but they do not know how to correct it.

Strategies You Can Teach
(to facilitate learning and talking about spelling)

Strategies that you need to know about so that you can identify what students are or are not using effectively

Not all students need to know or use all these strategies

This is a resource for you to draw on as you deal with many students who have a wide range of learning styles

1. Develop the student's self-confidence and belief that he/she is capable of being a competent writer. Teach the student how to evaluate his/her ability and monitor his/her own progress. (Help develop a metacognitive awareness.)
2. Continue to promote the student's intrinsic motivation
   • to be aware of spelling,
   • to be interested in words,
   • to use effective spelling strategies, and
   • to increase the number of automatically spelled words.
3. Develop rich listening and reading vocabularies and expand speaking and writing skills.
4. Be aware of the student's developmental stage and develop the student's willingness to risk and to "invent" spelling.
   • In beginning stages this invented or developmental spelling relies on the student's phoneme/grapheme knowledge.
   • In later stages this is also a strategy for generating (guessing) alternative spellings which can be compared. In fact part of the mature spelling process is to "invent" spellings for unfamiliar words using morphological and semantic as well as phonological knowledge.