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

It was also interesting to note that students were most articulate about how they attempted to spell words during the activity-based interviews when discussing the spelling test. Even though they often identified strategies that were inappropriate, we found that they often discussed several attempts using strategies. One of the students said "it was easy for me to spell `hand. I just sounded out,/hhaanndd/, it's how to spell it. However, most students tried to sound out during spelling for irregular words too (e.g., wus for was, tol for tall).

They made fewer comments about spelling strategy use during the sentence writing activity. Their responses were much more vague about their using strategies during the sentence writing activity. There may be two reasons for this outcome. First, the students may have been more motivated when taking the spelling test and the students may have been less motivated when they were writing sentences that described the stimulus picture. The other reason may be that writing sentences for students with learning disabilities is such a difficult process for them, one that includes handwriting, composition, and grammar that correct spelling was the least of their concerns. This analysis is supported by some of the comments student made during the writing activity: "I don't get a sentence, the problem is I can't write a sentence good, you know I don't know where to put period, question marks, that's the problem." Only one of the four subjects discussed using a rule-based spelling strategy when asked how they tried to spell words correctly during writing assignments.

In addition to determining how students with learning disabilities identified strategy use in spelling, we were further interested in their perception on the spelling instruction they received. For the question designed to tap their spelling instruction (e.g., tell me how your teachers teach you to spell), their comments placed greater emphasis on surficial form involved in the instruction than they did on the specific instructional contents. For example, one of the student described the spelling instruction like this: "It was, we did reading, then write. And had extra hard work. We learned from the book, we go back at the back table and had spelling test." Overall, the students failed to pick up details of spelling instruction,

Implications for Developing Spelling Intervention

The results from study I have important implications for teaching spelling to students with learning disabilities. This study is consistent with the results of other researchers who have shown that students with learning disabilities have strategy deficits (e.g., Gerber & Hall, 1987).

The present study extends these results and provides examples of the types of inappropriate spelling strategies students with learning disabilities use when taking tests and writing text. These results suggest that effective spelling programs must teach student to use strategies systematically, across a variety of word types. It is important to point out here that these students were no better applying spelling strategies to easy word types (e.g., phonetically regular words) than they were with difficult word types (e.g., words comprised of two morphographs and irregular words). This suggests that students must be taught specific spelling strategies for various word types. In addition, it seems reasonable to assume that students will require intensive instruction to learn to apply spelling strategies.