Lecture 31: Spelling as a Vocabulary Tool
believes that every letter makes a sound and that we read and spell
words in a left-to-right, linear fashion.z Children at this developmental stage also tend to be letter-name
spellers; that is, they believe that the names of the letters tell their
sounds. For example, a child at this stage might spell the word wise
as y-i-z. This strategy works well for many letters in the English
alphabet, such as b, but not all of them.z As long as children have been writing, they have been “inventing”
spellings, but in the early 1970s, research by Carol Chomsky
and Charles Read provided the linguistic key that unlocked the
systematic logic behind young children’s invented spellings.
ż At roughly the same time, Edmund Henderson and his
colleagues at the University of Virginia were also looking for
patterns and logic in children’s spellings across a range of ages&KLOGUHQLQWKHDOSKDEHWLFOD\HURIGHYHORSPHQWDUHOHDUQLQJWRVRXQGRXWDQG
VSHOORQHV\OODEOHVKRUWYRZHOZRUGVVXFKDVmat.© monkeybusinessimages/iStock/Thinkstock.