CONSTANCY AND CHANGE IN SPELLING DEVELOPMENT

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Abstract
Much current thinking on children's acquisition of orthography views the learning process as a complex interaction between the linguistically sensitive, hypothesis generating child and the abstract, hierarchically organized system of English spelling. This paper reviews briefly the principles of order in the orthographic system and then reports a study which traces patterns of constancy and change in spelling errors as children's word knowledge advances across the elementary years. The author elicited errors from children in grades 1 through 6 by means of a series of spelling inventories constructed from graded word pools; words from the word pools were selected for the inventories on the basis of their likelihood to yield errors as suggested by prior empirical work or by featural analysis. The findings support the conclusions of previous researchers who point to an orderly stage-like progression of word knowledge at the lower grades. Analysis of errors across the grades reveals clear patterns of coherent change and underscores the persistent difficulty of certain features (such as consonant doubling) characteristic of English orthography. Further, the findings appear to justify previous descriptions of advanced stages of word knowledge designed to account for error-types evident in the upper grades