Does spelling still matter? Yes. Here is how research says to teach it

Yes. Pan, Rickard and Bjork (2021) reviewed a century of research and conclude that spell-check has not made spelling skills unimportant. Spelling is closely linked to reading and writing, and a child who has to work hard to spell each word has less attention left for what they want to say. Spell-check also misses errors it cannot interpret, and readers still judge writing by its spelling.

Teaching spelling also helps more than spelling. Graham and Santangelo (2014) combined 53 studies of 6,037 pupils aged 5 to 18, each comparing children who were taught spelling with similar children who were not. On average, a child who was taught spelling did better than:

How to read these. If teaching made no difference, the average taught child would do better than 5 in 10 untaught children, just by chance. The further above 5 in 10, the bigger the benefit. Researchers report this as an "effect size" (the small number on each card), which measures how far apart the two groups were. It is not a correlation. We have turned each one into "better than X in 10" using the standard conversion.

1. Teach it on purpose, not by chance

Children do not pick up spelling just by reading. Structured teaching beat incidental learning in Graham and Santangelo's review, and Adoniou (2014) argues it needs explicit instruction. Esposito, Herbert and Sumner (2023) found spelling teaching varies a lot between schools in England: formal spelling policies were rare, and a third of teachers had had no spelling training in five years.

In Spelling.Live: photograph this week's school list and you get a weekly plan with one short activity a day, so practice happens every day rather than the night before the test.

2. Recall the word, don't just copy it

Pan and colleagues point to retrieval practice: pulling a spelling out of memory strengthens it more than looking at it again. That is why a spelling test is also a good way to learn, not only a way to measure.

In Spelling.Live: children hear the word and spell it from memory by writing, typing or saying it. They always get a clean first try, and help comes one step at a time only after a mistake. The progress report only calls a spelling rule secure once it has been written correctly without help, on different words and on different days.

3. Spread practice out over time

Distributed (spaced) practice - several short sessions spread over days - is one of the two techniques Pan and colleagues describe as evidence-based and highly robust. Short, spread-out practice beats one long session.

In Spelling.Live: five minutes a day, and every word has its own review schedule. A word spelled right comes back the next day, then in three days, then at longer gaps. A mistake brings it back the next day. Words due for review from earlier lists are added to the week automatically.

4. Use sounds, word parts and whole words together

Reed (2012) recommends combining approaches based on sounds, word parts and whole words. Adoniou (2014) says teachers need to know how letters map to sounds (phonology) and how words are built from parts and roots (morphology). Much of English spelling makes sense once you can see the parts: happy becomes happiness, and sign keeps its g because of signal.

In Spelling.Live: each mistake is matched to the rule behind it, whether that is a sound, a word part or a letter that looks alike, and explained in plain English. Word Parts builds long words from their prefixes, roots and suffixes, and the study step highlights the tricky bit of a word to look at.

5. Connect spelling to real writing

Graham and Santangelo's largest effect was spelling in children's own writing: the sentences and stories they write themselves, not just a spelling test. Reed also ties spelling to reading and writing rather than treating it as a list to memorise.

In Spelling.Live: children can write by hand on screen or on paper, the way they are tested at school. A photo of a paper test is marked for you, and children hear each new word in an example sentence.

Where we are still building: today children spell each word on its own. They hear it in a sentence, but they do not yet write their own sentences using it, which is where this research found the biggest benefit. We are working on an activity for exactly that: Use it, where a child writes a sentence of their own with the word and gets feedback on the spelling.

The research agrees on how to teach spelling: teach it on purpose, have children recall words rather than copy them, spread practice over days, and use sounds and word parts together. Spelling.Live is built on those four methods, five minutes a day around your child's own school list. The fifth finding, spelling in children's own writing, is the one we are still building, with Use it.