Putting Vocabulary Acquisition at the Heart of Spelling

The new draft curriculum puts additional emphasis on the teaching and learning of spelling, setting out a programme of study for years 1-6. It gives us lists of (albeit suggested) words through which to teach spellings. It gives prominence to the learning of spelling rules (and all the many exceptions). However, through all of this, there is a statement within the curriculum document onto which we hold tight when delivering Inset, running staff meetings or supporting teachers in school:

‘This guidance is not intended to constrain or restrict teachers’ creativity, simply to provide the structure on which they can construct exciting lessons.’

So, although there is a much clearer set of expectations, underpinning the teaching of spelling, there is apparent carte blanche as to the question of how to teach them.

Spelling 1.Spelling is not a single set of skills. It can be the encoding of phonics into writing, as it can be the visual memory of patterns on the page. It can be the structural understanding of words or the semantic meaning of a word within a sentence (I am certain many of you will have laboured the difference between using two, to and too at some point or another). Different children subscribe to different pedagogies for acquisition of spelling rules and no one rule can be given prominence (worth noting in an educational climate so weighted towards phonological awareness). And yet, even if we are to ensure provision within our teaching for the phonic, semantic, structural and visual strategies needed for spelling, there is little evidence to demonstrate that this will have an enduring impact upon children’s ability to accurately encode language.

What is known, is that children’s development of spelling strategies is closely linked to their acquisition of language. Many of us will talk anecdotally about the child who reads every day and has a broad vocabulary, and is also the best speller, but why is this? There is much evidence to support such an observation; the new curriculum makes reference to it, “children’s learning to spell is closely related to their learning to read and to their understandings about how spoken language is written down.” As children learn to talk, we know that their language has the potential to develop exponentially, as long as they are immersed in new, rich and relevant vocabulary throughout their primary schooling. As this vocabulary is acquired, following on not too far behind is the understanding of the graphemic composition of the word. Put simply, if children are exposed to varied and ambitious language as part of their daily diet of Literacy (so long as this coincides with opportunity to discover spelling rules and the patterns therein) then they can, through application of spellings for a tangible, purposeful outcome, learn how to spell words and apply these rules to new or unknown words. Although we are mindful that this is not indicative of every child’s vocabulary acquisition, and many children with a strong command of language will still struggle to put what they speak onto the written page, and this is the case for some children with dyslexia, however continued exposure to quality texts and the way that words works within them is demonstrated to have a positive impact on their ability to communicate and take risks with language.

This reflects the core values of everything we do at The Literacy Tree. We believe in engaging and exciting learning contexts that lead to purposeful outcomes and we believe that the best way to discover new language comes from their experiences with quality texts.

Spelling 2.Upon developing our latest package of Inset, and after much discussion, we decided that the only way to develop a whole-school approach to spelling, whilst maintaining our core values, was to embed it within the context of our day-to-day teaching sequence, underpinned by regular, purposeful activities that support children’s vocabulary acquisition. We set about writing two teaching sequences, the first using Oliver Jeffers poignant ‘The Heart and the Bottle’, the other using Anthony Browne’s engaging ‘King Kong’. Unpicking objectives and progression from the draft new curriculum, we began to write. It soon became evident that these objectives, far from sitting at odds with objectives from other strands of Literacy learning (composition and effect, sentence structure and punctuation, text structure and organisation), actually existed at the heart of them. Moreover, they complemented children’s ability to attain, acquire and, perhaps most importantly apply broad, rich and varied vocabularies.

The teaching sequences for The Heart and the Bottle and King Kong form part of our upcoming training day Building Vocabulary into Spelling held at Winton Primary School on Friday 27th September 2013.