A Brief History of Spelling Instruction
Since the mid-19th century, the “phonics versus whole word” controversy has spurred volumes of reading research, resulting in substantial changes in reading instruction methodology. In contrast, after maintaining a prominent curricular role throughout the 19th century, in the 20th century, spelling instruction became a “poor relation of reading and was tolerated only as a necessary nuisance” (Hanna, Hodges, & Hanna, 1971, p. 68).
In the United States, spelling instruction methodology has remained relatively unchanged since the Revolutionary War. Instruction has revolved around the memorization of various forms of lists of syllables and words, with the hope that the word knowledge learned would transfer to untaught spelling words and other literacy tasks. Spelling research in the 1920s and 1930s ushered in word lists based upon frequency-of-usage counts (Horn, 1969). By the 1950s, linguists such as Bloomfield, Barnhart, and Barnhart (1964) began creating spelling lists that emphasized orthographic or spelling structures.
At this point, spelling instruction still revolved around word lists, but the curriculum content branched into two schools: whole-word memorization driven by high-frequency word usage, and study of word families driven by phonetic and orthographic similarities. Horn and others believed that the best instructional method was whole-word memorization. Horn was a staunch opponent of teaching spelling generalizations because his research indicated that over a third of the words in a standard English dictionary had more than one pronunciation and that most letters had more than one sound. Similarly, when Clymer (1963/1996) used simple sound-letter correspondences to examine phonics generalizations from reading textbooks, he found only 17 of 45 generalization to be at least 75 percent reliable. The perceived lack of reliability in English words led Horn and his followers to believe that whole-word memorization of high-frequency words would lead to greater spelling proficiency.
Hanna, Hanna, Hodges, and Roudorf (1966) were representative of the second school of spelling instruction that favored instruction of phonetic and orthographic similarities. They found that the structure of English is reliable when analyzed on three different levels of sound-letter relationships: simple phoneme-grapheme (sound-letter) correspondence, positional effects (syllable or orthographic structures), and effects of syllable stress. Only 3 percent of the words used in Hanna et al.’s 17,000-word corpus required rote memorization.
From “Effects of Traditional Versus Extended Word Study Spelling Instruction on Students’ Orthographic Knowledge,” by Mary Abbott.
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted October 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232