Words Their Way

Stages of Spelling Development

1. Emergent Spelling (0-5 yrs.)

• This is the writing efforts of children who do not know how to read yet, and most of the time have not been introduced to formal reading instruction.
  • Seems to be an early, middle, and end level in the emergent stage

                                                              i.      Early level: students scribble, their drawings are not letters and there is no order of direction

                                                            ii.      Middle level: students produce some linear writing but there is still no sound to letter relationship

                                                          iii.      End level: students produce some memorized words that they use repeatedly

2. Letter Name-Alphabetic (5-8 yrs.)

• Encompasses that period of time during which students are formally taught to read
• They use the names of the letters as cues to the sound they want to represent.
• Broken into early, middle, and late periods because of the rapid growth during this time.

                                                              i.      Early period: students spell the first sound and then the last sound of single-syllable words.

                                                            ii.      Middle period: students spell many high frequency words correctly but also make spelling errors. Vowels appear but silent letters are not represented. Short vowels are used but confused.

                                                          iii.      End period: students have full phonemic segmentation so they are capable of representing most regular short-syllable words.

3.  Within Word Pattern Spelling (7-10 yrs.)

• Can read and spell many words correctly
• Begin to include patterns or chunks of letter sequences, can think about words in more than one dimension
• Students first study the common long-vowel patterns and then less common patterns such as the VCC pattern.

4. Syllables and Affixes Spelling (9-14 yrs)

• Students spell many words of more than one syllable correctly
• Many one-syllable short and long-vowel words are spelled correctly
• Many errors occur in two-syllable words and fall at the place where syllables and affixes meet
• Usually use but confuse conventions for preserving vowel sounds when adding an inflected ending
• Toward the end of this stage students have trouble with affixes that change the meaning of the word

                                                              i.      They may misspell affixes

                                                            ii.      But by studying base words and affixes as meaning units, these students anticipate the next stage…

5. Derivational Relations Spelling ( grade 4 or 5 through college)

• When students examine how words share common derivations and related base words and word roots
• Spell most words correctly, most errors have to do with the reduced vowel in derivationally related pairs.
• Students spelling errors often have to do with using but confusing issues of consonant doubling in absorbed prefixes, the convention of changing the last consonant of a prefix to the first consonant of the root word.
• Another issue during this stage is changing adjectives to nouns, and it is not uncommon to find students using but not confusing these derivational endings