Spelling

Omission, Insertion, Substitution, Transposition and Grapheme substitution

Author: Greg Brooks, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Sheffield

Note: Some use is made of phonetic symbols enclosed in forward slashes, e.g. /ə/, which are explained when first used (/ə/ represents the schwa vowel, the first phoneme in about and the last in butter). For more detail on phonetic symbols see Burton (2011). Example words and errors are shown in italics, and graphemes within angle brackets, e.g. <or>.

The five main categories

A developmental sequence of spelling acquisition and associated errors.

This section describes the typical sequence of development, but individual children may jump a stage, or seem to get stuck in one, or exhibit features of two stages simultaneously, or seem to go through some stages in reverse order. The labels for the stages were coined by Frith (1985).

The primary goal of the MESH Spelling site developers has been to bring together insights from the past 40 years of research into spelling, and to present these in ways that are bite-sized, clear and intelligible to a non-expert. We know that all teachers understand the importance of being able to spell, but we also know that as successive governments have made teacher preparation more and more school-based, teachers have had fewer and fewer opportunities to learn about the cognitive processes that underpin spelling before they enter the classroom.

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