S7 E8 - Why Your Spelling Approach Might Be Working Against You (Part 2)

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Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Structured Literacy Podcast, recorded right here in Burnie, Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people. I'm Jocelyn, and this week we are following on from last week's episode. In that episode, I talked about the evidence, what the research tells us about spelling instruction, the connection between spelling, reading, and writing, and the instructional design problems that could be quietly working against our most vulnerable students. If you haven't listened to that episode, I'd encourage you to go back and start there because it sets up everything we're going to talk about right now.

Getting Practical

Today I want to get practical. I want to talk about the students who are sitting in your classrooms right now, the real range of starting points you are working with, and what instruction actually needs to look like for each of them. And I'll be walking through the specific design decisions that we made when developing Spelling Success in Action 1, because I think that seeing the evidence put into practice is the most useful thing I can offer you. So let's begin.

One of the most important, and honestly, at the moment, it feels like one of the least considered aspects of spelling instruction in upper primary and secondary is the reality that students in a Year 3, 5, or 7 classroom do not all have the same starting point in the journey. They never have. And I think teachers know this. But there's so much instructional design that's going on that pretends that they do. This might look efficient, but looking efficient and being efficient and responsive are two different things. When we work with schools to help them unpack spelling data, we find that most classes contain a mix, and I put these into four broad categories.

Group 1: Solid Foundations

So the first group have what I call solid foundations. These students have strong phonics recall, strong real word and pseudo-word spelling. They can decode and encode reliably. For these students, systematic phonics instruction is not particularly necessary. What they need as their core work is morphology, explicit instruction in how words are built through the prefixes, suffixes, and bases. It's also worth mentioning that this group is probably a small minority of your students. When we help schools unpack their data, we rarely see a large number of students with solid conscious knowledge of phonics and orthographic conventions. These students might know when a word looks right, but they don't know why. So the not knowing why is the important missing piece here.

Group 2: Guessing Zone

The second group, which is where so many students sit, is in the guessing zone. These students have reasonably strong real-word and possibly pseudo-word spelling, but they have weak phonics recall. They can spell words they've encountered before, they've built up enough orthographic memory to manage familiar vocabulary. But when they hit an unfamiliar word, they're guessing or running on instinct. They don't have reliable access to their phonics and orthographic knowledge to use as a decoding and encoding strategy. For these students, phonics instruction is more like a reminder. It's short, sharp, and targeted. It's about making explicit what is partly there, but not being reliably accessed. The focus is on building declarative knowledge, actually being able to name and explain the pattern, not just sometimes apply it.

And why does that matter? Why go to the trouble of making sure that students can discuss spelling with a functional level of understanding? Because the research tells us so. When teachers clearly explain spelling patterns and word-building rules, and then have students talk about those rules and use them while spelling, students make stronger gains in spelling accuracy than those who only encounter the same patterns through practice and regular classroom routines. And I'm not talking about building an army of students who can chant the spelling rule but don't understand what it means or how to use it. I'm talking about helping students know something so they can make a conscious choice and understand why they're making the decisions they're making. Spelling patterns need to be visible, discussable, and usable. Knowing what looks right is not enough. The students really do need to know why. But remember, we aren't teaching a course in linguistics here. Remember, my favorite F-word about instruction is functional. But there is real value in them being able to reason about how words are constructed, not just remember them.

Group 3: Incomplete Foundations

The third group have incomplete foundations. These students have weak phonics recall, maybe reasonable word spelling, real word spelling, so they can manage words they've seen a lot, but the pseudo-word spelling, the nonsense word spelling is probably weak. They can't reliably apply phonics knowledge to new or unfamiliar words. For these students, phonics instruction is more like initial instruction. The complexity needs to be managed carefully. Single syllable words are used as the core with common multisyllabic words for stretch. And they may be able to participate in age-appropriate morphology instruction with appropriate support. But the emphasis there is on "may". This needs to be scaffolded thoughtfully and have the decision made about whether this is appropriate based on what you know of the student.

Group 4: Completely Missing Foundations

The fourth group, and this is the one that our Year 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 teachers, and if we're honest, beyond, often feel "I don't know how to manage". These students have just completely missing foundations. They have weak phonics recall, weak real word spelling, and weak pseudo-word spelling as well. They are not encoding reliably at any level. And for these students, phonics is the critical focus. Importantly, they are not yet in a position to benefit from age-appropriate morphology instruction. Adding that layer of complexity before the phonics foundations are in place is likely to overwhelm, not support. When you look at these students' data, what you'll often see is they have a reasonable handle on consonants and much of the basic code, they're probably still getting muddled with long and short vowels, they may have a few vowel diagraphs that they can recognise and maybe one or two that they can write, but not much going on beyond that point.

4 Groups: 1 Classroom

Now I know what you're thinking, Jocelyn, that's four different groups in one classroom. How on earth am I supposed to manage that? And I hear you, I really do. I think that one of the most unfair things that we do to upper primary and early secondary teachers is expect that the teacher can differentiate and organise something. The reality is that we need to be data informed. Now, the students in that final group who have completely missing foundations, they need intense instruction. They are not going to learn what they need from whole class teaching. However, the other three groups can be managed in the main classroom with appropriate differentiation. Because the alternative to this is giving every student in the same class the exact same instruction, regardless of where they're up to. So we can either have one size fits all programs that we just deliver to all students in the class, or we can have data-informed instruction that considers the student's starting point, their learning profile, and what comes next.

One Size Fits All = One Size Fits None

Treating every student in the class as if they're the same guarantees that we will miss the mark for a significant proportion of the students. One size fits all in practice is one size fits virtually none. And here's something I want to be really honest about. Data-informed instruction does feel messier than plug and play, where everybody starts at Unit One and you just move through together regardless of where you're up to. Data informed instruction does feel messier. It does. But with the right tools and the right guidance, we can get a lot closer to genuinely responsive teaching than we're probably doing at the moment. And the payoff for the students who have been quietly struggling while the lesson moves past them, or those who are dying of boredom because they already know what's in the lesson, the payoff for those students is enormous. So it's worth doing the work of coming together to pool resources for these students. Every classroom has two or three with missing phonics foundations. And it's entirely possible to bring them together during spelling instruction time so that a learning support teacher can provide targeted, intensive instruction to the group. Not all intervention has to be one-on-one. And how do I know that this approach works? Because I've done it. I've done it in schools that I've led and I've helped other schools to find the right solution for their context. I'm not sharing a theoretical wondering here with you. I'm sharing real-world experience with a research foundation.

When we're teaching age-appropriate morphology to students who are ready for that and have the foundations to engage, we can teach whole class and work our way through the scope and sequence because so much of that sits a lot closer to vocabulary than it does to the foundations of spelling. But phonics and orthographic conventions are a whole different ball game. There's a finite body of content. Students either have it or they don't. And when we're talking about filling the gaps, we need to be data informed and targeted so that we're hitting the Goldilocks spot. Not too easy, not too hard. We want to optimise intrinsic load of the task and give the students what they need.

Age Appropriateness

I want to address something that comes up regularly when I talk about phonics instruction for older students, and that is the question of age appropriateness. There's sometimes an assumption that if a Year 7 or 8 student needs phonics instruction of some level of intensity, that the lesson will feel babyish or humiliating. And I understand where that concern comes from. Nobody wants a 13- or 14-year-old sitting with simple CVC words feeling like they've failed, and why are you asking me to do this when I can already spell these words? Just because a student needs to be more aware of phonics does not mean that they need simple words. Desirable difficulty, the kind of productive challenge that builds real learning, can also be created through vocabulary complexity and orthographic complexity. A Year 7 student who needs to consolidate complex vowel patterns because they can recognise them with ease but struggle to recall them for spelling, can do this work with somewhat sophisticated, age-appropriate vocabulary. The phonics concept might be one that a Year 1 student is also learning, but the words used and the lesson structures used do not have to be. The reverse is also true. Just because a student is in Year 8, it doesn't mean that they're ready for long multisyllabic or multimorphemic words. The complexity that is appropriate depends on where the student actually is up to, not on the year level.

So what we do in all of our work is to create simple, consistent teaching structures that give teachers the flexibility to choose the level of challenge that fits the students in front of them rather than locking everyone in to the same level of complexity because it feels tidier, because we want something that's plug and play and looks easier. The design philosophy behind everything that we create at Jocelyn Seamer Education is this. Our role is to give teachers the tools, structures, and knowledge they need that enables them to optimise instruction for their students. You don't have to be an instructional architect. You do need to have the space to make decisions for your students because no program developer knows your kids. You do. We're not in the classroom observing, monitoring, and checking for understanding. You are. Our job is to give you the tools so that you can teach well and help you grow in confidence and capability.

Spelling Success in Action 1

In Spelling Success in Action 1, our phonics, orthographic, and early morphology catch-up program element for older students, words are organised into three groups within every unit. Mostly it's single-syllable, multisyllable, and less common vocabulary. So everyone in the class is learning the same concept with the same lesson structure. Everyone gets high-quality instruction, but the complexity and vocabulary is matched to the student. Now, some of this is because we give you differentiated resources that you can print, and some of it is in the active choices that you make in the classroom. So a Year 7 student who needs to work on a phonics pattern can do that with vocabulary from the more complex list that stretches them meaningfully, that keeps their attention, that makes this thing relevant to them. But a student in the same class who is a more fluent speller can be challenged through extended vocabulary. So the concept is shared, but the challenge is calibrated, and the teacher decides on the appropriate level because each teacher knows the students.

Lessons within the program fit within a 15 to 20 minute window planned for four days a week. Online teacher training is included, it's not an add-on cost, covering both content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge across seven modules. We know that one of the barriers to teachers feeling confident in teaching students about spelling is a lack of knowledge that they themselves have because we were never taught. And coaching is available for schools who want support building internal capacity and capability around data collection and using that data to respond to student need. And it contains every element of instruction I've talked about across these two episodes. We include one concept at a time. We have multiple words per pattern that are revisited over days, not engaged with and then left. There's a volume of practice that's appropriate, embedded assessment. You don't have extra time to be doing progress monitoring, it's built into the program. There's text-level application and retrieval built into every lesson.

When I left schools five and a half years ago, my intention was not to become a program developer. But as I've worked with teachers and I've worked with schools, what I've seen is that everyone's putting so much effort into the instruction and still quite possibly not seeing the outcomes that should match all of that effort. There are no magic wands in this work. I can't say "Here, take this resource and every problem will be solved". That's nonsense. But I can say here's something that will help you do the hard work of responding to a range of student needs without having to be an educational architect. Here's something grounded in the best research we currently have, written by people who know exactly how it feels to stand at the front of a classroom responsible for the learning of 25 kids. We also know what it feels like to be leading a staff who are looking for answers. We know what the weight of that responsibility feels like.

Evaluation Questions

Before I close today, I want to leave you with a few questions that you can use to evaluate your current spelling instruction, whatever program or approach you're using.

• Does your current approach use diagnostic data to determine where students should begin? Or does it start all students at the same point, regardless of what data might show?
• Does it teach patterns across many, many different words enough for students to genuinely build schema? Or does it have just one or two words per lesson?
• Does it manage the total metalinguistic and cognitive load within each lesson carefully? Or does it introduce or include multiple concepts in rapid succession, even if it looks like the individual components are small?
• Does it include retrieval practice for long-term retention? Or does it move through content and leave it behind?
• And does it get to text level, the level where spelling actually matters in writing? And is that text level appropriate for the students?
• Are you able to adjust the complexity level of the text to support a wide range of students to fully engage well at the Goldilocks spot?

If you can answer yes to all those questions, then you're in a really strong position. If there are gaps, that's useful information as well. You might be able to tweak what you have and bring your approach into stronger alignment. But if what's needed is more than a tweak, if you'd practically have to rewrite your current program to make it effective for your students and work for your teachers, then it might be worth considering a change.

English spelling is not random. It is not chaotic. It is a meaningful layered system shaped by sound, structure, meaning, and history. And it's absolutely learnable at any age when we teach it well. But remember, while there are multiple linguistic elements to words, phonics, orthographic conventions, morphology, and etymology, we don't necessarily treat all of them as if they are the same. Morphology is tightly linked to vocabulary. Phonics and orthographic conventions is mostly constrained knowledge that needs to be built strongly without any gaps. Because if students do not have strong knowledge of phonics, orthographic conventions, and early morphology, including how to add suffixes to a word, then everything they try to do at school is difficult. So if we want to help students get better in science, to perform better in HASS, to get better in maths and get better at English, teach them how the language system works. Because it's only when those essential elements of the language system are automatic that they can add more things in and perform more complex tasks.

If you're wondering if Spelling Success in Action 1 is something that you need, you can download the free early morphology diagnostic assessment from our website and we will link to this in the show notes of this episode. If you'd like to explore Spelling Success in Action 1 further, you can read more and download a brochure from JocelynSeamerEducation.com, and we'll put a link to that in the notes as well. If these episodes have been useful, I would genuinely love for you to share them with a colleague. That's all from me for now. Until next time, happy teaching. Bye.

Show Notes:

Early Morphology Assessment for Years 3 and beyond

Spelling Success in Action 1

Want to get all your students up to a solid foundation? Click HERE.