Spelling

See also the page First stages of reading and spelling. The following strategies are useful after the first stages of reading and spelling skills have been developed and for catch up programmes.

Both Nessy.com.uk and ‘Teaching Literacy to Learners with Dyslexia, A Multisensory Approach’ (by Kathleen Kelly and Sylvia Phillips, 2016) recommend using BME (beginning, middle and end) sheets. These can be used to practise writing new graphemes and digraphs in the appropriate place. This helps children remember which grapheme/digraph is the best choice in each place of a word. The idea is that the learner is asked what usually makes the long /ā/ phoneme at the beginning of a word and the learner should reply /ā/ at the beginning, the letter ‘a’ and write the letter under the B. Then when asked what usually makes the /ā/ phoneme in the middle of a word, they reply “/ā/ in the middle, split digraph ‘a’-‘e’ as in cake or ‘a’ ‘i’ /ai/ as in rain as they are writing the letters down and continue with the /ā/ written as ‘a’ ‘y’ at the end of a word. Learners then get used to writing the correct graphemes in a word.

The best way to learn to spell a word is to first split a word into smaller parts or syllables and then sound out the phonemes in each part or syllable (See the section on Phonological and Phonemic Awareness). This means that a learner is only concentrating on one part of the word at a time. Remember, there is always at least one vowel in each syllable. The learner also needs to work out if the word contains a prefix, then apply any spelling rules to the base word before adding on any suffixes.

The dyslexic learner often finds difficulties blending adjacent consonants (when two consonants phonemes follow each other without any intervening vowel phoneme) at the beginning or end of a word e.g. sl, lp, pt, ct, st, sm, br. It is important to find which pairs of adjacent consonants the learner is finding difficult and concentrate on learning these by using a separate reading grapheme card with a picture on the reverse and practise writing words with these sounds, identifying where in a word they can be found and using a BME sheet for practising.

Ensure that when children do not know a spelling, they do not generalise and ask how to spell the whole word, because they will nearly always know how to spell some of the word themselves. Get the child to write down the parts of the word they know to spell. Then they have alternatives: if there is someone available to help them, then they should for help to spell the tricky bit, but they need to show that they are aware of what choices it could be i.e. they should be asking how do you spell the /ā/ sound in late and questioning which variation it is e.g. is it /ā/ as in rain, /ā/ as in away, or /ā/ as in cake (read The Phonics Queen, Quality Phonics, The Why, The How. The Question by Natasha Tuite 2021 for her detailed explanation ‘how to ask the question’). This is a time when you can reinforce the usual spelling rule, advising that letters ‘a”y’ (use letter names) as in ‘away’ are usually only used at the end of a word (as shown on BME sheet above) so they are then left with just two choices. Tell them the correct spelling from the choice they have given. It would also be a good time to give older learners a family of words to compare, so reply ‘The /ā/ in late is spelt with the split a-e as in cake and show them other words that are spelt the same as late i.e. plate and slate which contain the word ‘late’ and also date, mate and gate which rhyme. Therefore the learner has shown that they know which sound they are looking for, displayed they know the choices and been given a family of words that they can try to store when they are next looking to spell a similar word. If, however there is not anybody available to help, then the child should have a go at writing the word, but underline it to show that they were not sure, and an adult could check it with them later or the learner could check in a dictionary. Alternatively the learner could write the word with a gap for the tricky bit, but writing their two choices of spelling to discuss later. At least then the learner is having a go at most of the word, can carry on with their work and can check it later.

Learners need to identify compound words e.g. bedroom, football, headache and understand they comprise of two base words. They need to be able to spell each of the words separately and then join them together to make the compound word.

Learners need to practise writing sentences with newly learned spelling rules. Sentences should be dictated to them so they do not also have the pressure of thinking about what words to write. Sentences should only include graphemes and spelling rules that they have learned so far, in order to consolidate that learning and ensure they are also able to concentrate on handwriting and punctuation.

There are many specific spelling rules, which are shown separately on the Spelling rules page.