The Strategic Spelling Skills of Students with Learning Disabilities: The Results of Two Studies

Journal of Instructional Psychology, March, 2000 by Craig Darch, Soobang Kim, Susan Johnson, Hollis James

The four subjects met as a group in a room adjacent to their classroom. This group interview lasted approximately 45 minutes. The structured interview was designed to foster general discussion among the students and the experimenter about students' use of spelling strategies and their perceptions about the importance of spelling and the type of spelling instruction they had received in school. The students were prompted to discuss in as much detail as possible the strategies they used to spell words, and whether they used strategies whenever they were engaged in writing activities. Our interest was to determine if these students used spelling strategies in all of their writing activities regardless of the content area. Table 1 provides questions that the authors used to guide the structured interview. As can be seen from Table 1, students were probed as to their use of strategies when they were spelling, how they attempted to correct spelling mistakes, and their personal feelings about their spelling difficulties.

Table 1 Questions Used for Structured and Activity-Based Interviews

Structured Interview

1. When you spell words, what kind of things do you do to help you spell correctly?

2. If you are having trouble with a word, what do you do to try and spell it correctly?

3. Why do you think some kids have trouble with spelling?

4. How do you feel if you can't spell words when you are writing?

5. Tell me how your teachers teach you to spell.

Activity-Based Interviews

1. Tell me the words you had trouble in spelling.

2. Why did you spell this word like that (experimenter points to a misspelled word)?

3. How did you come up with this word? (experimenter points to a respelled word)?

4. If a teacher asks you to correct a misspelled word, what kinds of things do you do to spell it correctly?

Activity-Based Interviews

To explore the task specificity of spelling strategies, we used two spelling tasks, a spelling test and a writing activity. The spelling test was a formal assessment of spelling skills. The senior author met individually with each student on consecutive day to conduct activity-based interviews. After a short introduction and explanation as to our intent, the activity-based interviews began with the experimenter asking the student to complete a 15 word spelling test. The words chosen for this test represented words from 4 different word types. The word types tested were (a) phonetically regular words (e.g., did, fast, cup), (b) words with a final e and a long vowel sound (e.g., gave, ride), (c) words comprised of two morphographs (e.g., re-teach), and (d) phonetically irregular words in which one or more letters do not represent their most common sound (e.g., was, your, tall). We were interested in determining the strategies these students used for spelling different words types. The purpose of this activity was to discuss with the students the strategies they used to spell words during this activity.

Next, after 5 minute break, the senior author administered the writing activity individually to the four children. The subjects were presented with a picture taken from an elementary reading text which depicted several animals playing in a field. After presenting the picture, the experimenter began a discussion with the student about what was happening in the picture. After this discussion, which usually lasted about 5-10 minutes, the student was asked to write as many sentences as they could that described what they saw in the picture. The purpose of this activity was to determine whether, when writing sentences, students used spelling strategies and what types of spelling errors they made during this writing activity. For example, after a student completed writing a sentence, the experimenter would point to a word that was misspelled and asked the subject what way he/she used to spell that particular word. Next, the student was told that the word was spelled incorrectly and asked to try and respell it. After the student completed the respelling, the student was asked to describe how he/she came up with the new spelling of the word. Table 1 provides a list of the questions that the experimenter used to identify the strategies used by the students.