Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review

Despite the importance of spelling for both writing and reading, there is considerable disagreement regarding how spelling skills are best acquired. During this and virtually all of the last century, some scholars have argued that spelling should not be directly or formally taught as such instructio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Reading & writing Vol. 27; no. 9; pp. 1703 - 1743
Main Authors: Graham, Steve, Santangelo, Tanya
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.10.2014
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Corpus analysis
Correlation
Education
Effect Size
Elementary Education
Elementary School Students
Experiments
High School Students
Instructional Effectiveness
Kindergarten
Language and Literature
Linguistics
Literacy
Literacy skills
Literature Reviews
Meta Analysis
Middle School Students
Native Language Instruction
Neurology
Phonological Awareness
Phonology
Psycholinguistics
Quasi-experimental methods
Quasiexperimental Design
Question answer sequences
Reading ability
Reading Acquisition
Reading Instruction
Reading Skills
Secondary school students
Skill Development
Skills
Social Sciences
Spelling
Spelling Instruction
Students
Teaching
Teaching Methods
Writing
Writing Acquisition
Writing instruction
Writing Skills
Written Language Instruction
New York
United States > US
Writing
Reading
Spelling
Meta-analysis
ISSN:0922-4777, 1573-0905
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Despite the importance of spelling for both writing and reading, there is considerable disagreement regarding how spelling skills are best acquired. During this and virtually all of the last century, some scholars have argued that spelling should not be directly or formally taught as such instruction is not effective or efficient. We conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies to address these claims. The corpus of 53 studies in this review included 6,037 students in kindergarten through 12th grade and yielded 58 effect sizes (ESs) that were used to answer eight research questions concerning the impact of formally teaching spelling on spelling, phonological awareness, reading, and writing performance. An average weighted ES was calculated for each question and the quality of included studies was systematically evaluated. Results provided strong and consistent support for teaching spelling, as it improved spelling performance when compared to no/unrelated instruction (ES = 0.54) or informal/incidental approaches to improving spelling performance (ES = 0.43). Increasing the amount of formal spelling instruction also proved beneficial (ES = 0.70). Gains in spelling were maintained over time (ES = 0.53) and generalized to spelling when writing (ES = 0.94). Improvements in phonological awareness (ES = 0.51) and reading skills (ES = 0.44) were also found. The positive outcomes associated with formal spelling instruction were generally consistent, regardless of students’ grade level or literacy skills.
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ISSN:0922-4777
1573-0905
DOI:10.1007/s11145-014-9517-0