Pennington Publishing Blog

Middle School Spelling

As an MA reading specialist and ELA teacher, I spent the last dozen of my 36 years teaching ELA to seventh and eighth graders. At my last middle school, I taught with 14 highly skilled ELA teachers. None of them taught spelling. Some years ago I mentioned in a department meeting that I still taught spelling and my colleagues were curious as to why. I told them that my kids needed it and asked them if their kids needed spelling instruction. They stumbled around a bit, blamed elementary teachers for not doing so, provided anecdotes about Einstein being a poor speller, and finally settled on “We don’t know.”

Seeing the opening, I volunteered to email them the audio file of my diagnostic spelling tests and told them I would correct the tests and show them what their students know and don’t know. They readily agreed. A week later I placed the mastery matrices of the spelling assessments in their teacher boxes. The results clearly indicated that most had a few areas of spelling deficits in terms of spelling patterns. However, some of their students showed many areas of spelling pattern deficits. I suggested to our department chair that we might dedicate a portion of our next department meeting to brainstorming how we might address those deficits. That brainstorming session never took place. I did brainstorm why with some of my reading specialist buddies. They provided reasons why middle school teachers were not interested in teaching spelling (mainly because they did not know how), but also why they should be teaching spelling to their students.

10 Reasons Middle School Teachers Should Teach Spelling

1. Intermediate, upper elementary, and middle school teachers are not doing their jobs teaching spelling. Take a look at the yellow chart. Clearly, beginning readers in grades 1 and 2 tend to score similarly on reading comprehension and spelling. However, as intermediate teachers (grades 3 and 4) tend to assume that all necessary phonics skills have been mastered, they also tend to stop teaching the other side of the decoding coin: encoding (spelling). The results for middle school spellers are undocumented by research; however, teachers would certainly agree that middle schoolers do not reverse the trend.

Mehta et al. (2005)

2. Spelling is not acquired naturally through wide reading It’s not caught; it must be taught.

3. Spelling is not a primary skill; it is a literacy skill for all ages.

4. Spelling is not a genetic predisposition. Once a bad speller, not always a bad speller.

5. You can teach middle schoolers spelling. Spelling is more predictable than many middle school teachers think. Spelling expert, Dr. Louisa Moats, estimates that 84% of English words either directly correspond to their sound-spellings or do so with an additional spelling rule (https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Moats.pdf.) Plus, middle school students can catch up while they keep up with grade-level spelling. Remedial spelling skills are teachable.

6. Spelling helps with reading. According to Catherine Snow, the real importance of spelling for reading as follows: “Spelling and reading build and rely on the same mental representation of a word. Knowing the spelling of a word makes the representation of it sturdy and accessible for fluent reading” (https://www.readingrockets.org/article/how-spelling-supports-reading).

7. Spelling aids vocabulary development. This is especially true with respect to Greek and Latin prefixes, suffixes, and roots: the meat of middle school orthography.

8. Spelling helps with writing. Teachers often underestimate the amount of mental muscle expended by poor spellers attempting to select words which they can substitute for difficult spellings. Dictionaries take too much time, including online ones. Spell check is less than 80% accurate.

9. Teaching spelling (both grade level and remedial) does not take much instructional time and produces immediate pay-off for students.

10. Spelling matters. Poor spellers are brutally bullied and suffer considerable discrimination. A misspelled word on an employment application almost always dooms an applicant. Want to be the subject of a meme? Misspell a word. Think about how many puzzles and games require good spelling. Poor spelling is equated with lack of intelligence by a majority of Americans.

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My take? Synthetic phonics is the most efficient means of teaching the alphabetic code and should be taught systematically as part of any beginning reading program or reading intervention program. However, good reading and spelling programs provide additional analytic phonics activities, such as syllabication and spelling pattern word sorts. Plus, while most students learn with a synthetic approach, others respond best with an analytic approach. Good teachers also use incidental embedded phonics instruction as teachable moments to study words in depth as they use shared and guided reading. The best means of determining whether any method of reading instruction is working? Assessment. Flexible teachers use data to inform instruction and the instructional approach to meet the needs of individual students.

Get the Diagnostic Reading  and Spelling Assessments FREE Resource:

The author’s Differentiated Spelling Instruction provides quality spelling programs for grades 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Following are the program components:

Differentiated Spelling Instruction

• Diagnostic Spelling Assessment: a comprehensive test of each previous grade level spelling pattern to determine what students know and what they don’t know with Spelling Assessment Mastery Matrix
• 102 Remedial Sound-Spelling Worksheets Corresponding to the Diagnostic Spelling Assessment (Grade 8… other grade levels have fewer to correspond with grade-level spellings. All grade levels use the same diagnostic assessment.)
• Weekly Diagnostic Spelling Tests
• Weekly Spelling Sort Worksheets for Each Spelling Pattern (with answers) formatted for classroom display. Students self-correct to learn from their own mistakes.
• Syllable Transformers and Syllable Blending formatted for classroom display and interactive instruction
• Syllable Worksheets (with answers) formatted for classroom display
• Four Formative Assessments (given after 7 weeks of instruction)
• Summative Assessment
• Spelling Teaching Resources: How to Study Spelling Words, Spelling Proofreading Strategies for Stories and Essays, Syllable and Accent Rules, Outlaw Words, 450 Most Frequently Used Words, 100 Most Often Misspelled Words, 70 Most Commonly Confused Words, Eight Great Spelling Rules, Memory Songs and Raps (with Mp3 links), and Spelling Review Games

Read one of our customer testimonials: “I work with a large ELL population at my school and was not happy with the weekly spelling tests, etc. Through my research in best practices, I know that spelling patterns and word study are so important at this age group. However, I just couldn’t find anything out there that combines the two. We have just adopted RtI at my school and your spelling matrix is a great tool for documentation. The grade level spelling program and remediation are perfect for my students.”

Heidi

Grammar/Mechanics differentiated spelling instruction, middle school spelling, spelling diagnostic assessment, spelling programs, spelling tests, spelling workbooks, teaching spelling to middle school

Diagnostic Spelling Assessment

In the Whole Language Movement and concurrent National Writing Project popularity of the 1980s and 1990s, spelling was relegated to the editing stage of the writing process. Teachers were instructed to throw away their spelling workbooks and some states, including California, prohibited state funding for the purchase of spelling programs.

I, like other ELA teachers, cheerfully relegated spelling to the dumpster. After all, one less subject to teach! And, to be honest, the only spelling teaching I ever did was to pre-test on Monday, throw out a word search or crossword puzzle of the spelling words, tell students to study the list, and post-test on Friday. Hardly teaching at all.

During that period of time I was earning my masters degree as a reading specialist. The buzzword(s) of our program was balanced literacy. Upon reflection, I have no idea of what opposite ideologies were being placed in proper balance. We had no phonics (decoding) training, nor any spelling (encoding) training.

For my masters thesis I was able to convince my supervisor to approve a qualitative historical analysis, not the usual experimental design. I chose the reading instruction included in the McGuffey Readers. For 85 years, these readers were the primary instructional tool for American teachers. The readers were not just for primary students: intermediate and middle school tweeners also received instruction in this series.

The readers consisted of morally-based character education stories, vocabulary, phonics, spelling, and a few comprehension questions. As I pored over the editions from 1836 up to the 1920s, I found certain pedagogical refinements, but the instructional methodology was remarkably consistent. As a publisher, I understand the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy; however, consumers have always been suckered by the “New and Improved” marketing strategy, as well. The readers were largely unchanged, in terms of how reading and spelling were taught.

As you might imagine, the juxtaposition of my masters program reading philosophy and that of the McGuffey Readers caused quite a bit of consternation for me. I had just completed six years of middle school teaching and was now at the high school level. Every professional development class that I took and taught ignored the skills of reading and writing and focused solely on the content of literacy. If I mentioned that spelling had been an integral instructional component for most of our country’s history (including the New England Primer and others prior to the McGuffey Readers), it was only in the context of see what outdated forms of instruction those ill-informed educators used to teach.

However, subsequent to the Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read in 2000, I, like so many other ELA teachers who practiced their skills as reading specialists, was confronted with new, consistent reading research findings  that have made me backtrack and see the value of teaching the reading skills found in the McGuffey Readers. In reading terms, structural (or word) analysis is essential for above grade level, at grade level, and below grade level readers. Computer detection of eye-movement and the correlation of good readers look at the sound-symbol relationships within words was convincing. In other words, phonics and spelling (two sides of the same coin) matter.

I took a job as a district elementary reading specialist in Elk Grove Unified School District (the third largest district in California) and, along with a cadre of other bright program specialists, we were able to help improve elementary student reading proficiency percentiles from 45 to 72% within only a few years Elk Grove Unified School District. However, the same growth was not achieved by middle and high school students. Middle school reading proficiency continued to under-perform in the mid 40 percentiles. Our brilliant District Reading Coordinator and Associate Superintendent for Elementary knew why this was so, but the Associate Superintendent of Secondary Education refused to move entrenched secondary teachers toward reading skills instruction.

The false dichotomy of elementary teachers teaching students to learn to read and secondary teachers teaching students to read to learn continues to contribute to the widely recognized middle school slump in reading ability. Only one-in-six of below grade level readers by grade 6 ever improve to at grade level reading. “In the simplest terms, these studies ask: Do struggling readers catch up? The data from the studies are clear: Late bloomers are rare; skill deficits are almost always what prevent children from blooming as readers” (American Federation of Teachers, as published by Reading Rockets).

Middle School Spelling

As a reading intervention specialist, the Response to Intervention movement of the last decade has largely focused on early primary reading intervention. Few middle schools have adopted comprehensive reading intervention programs, and even fewer high schools. Interestingly enough, I have found more remedial reading and writing programs at the community college level than at the high school level, here in California.

So what can middle school ELA teachers do? Advocate for your students, especially those one-in-six students, to develop effective Response to Intervention reading programs in your school and district. Take the plunge and differentiate reading instruction within your classroom. Risk the behavior management challenges and multi-level lesson plans for the good of your kids.

However, if the above seems un-do-able for now, or if you’re in the been there and done that phase, what small (yet, significant) step can you take to make a difference for your middle school students? Teach spelling. Not the useless pre-test, word search or crossword puzzle, study, and post-test method I used to employ; not the useless pass out and memorize the list of all “No Excuse” spelling words; not the silly requirement to spell correctly your list of hard SAT, ACT, or Academic Word List vocabulary words, but a comprehensive spelling patterns program for grade-level spelling patterns instruction and remedial spelling patterns instruction. Teaching spelling for a small amount of time per week will give your middle school students the biggest bang for the buck, in terms of reading skills development.

Do your middle school students need spelling instruction? Absolutely? Still unconvinced? I challenge you to administer my FREE comprehensive Diagnostic Spelling Assessment and Recording Matrix. It has 102 words (I did say comprehensive) and covers all common spelling patterns and conventional spelling rules. It only takes 22 minutes and includes an audio file with test administration instructions. Once you see the gaps in your middle school students spelling patterns, you’re going to want to fill those gaps.

Get the Diagnostic Spelling Assessment FREE Resource:

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