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Predicting word‐spelling difficulty in 7‐ to 11‐year‐olds
Author(s) -
Spencer Ken
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
journal of research in reading
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.077
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9817
pISSN - 0141-0423
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9817.00091
Subject(s) - spelling , turkish , psychology , linguistics , word (group theory) , literacy , german , orthography , word recognition , word lists by frequency , transparency (behavior) , grapheme , reading (process) , computer science , pedagogy , philosophy , graphene , physics , computer security , quantum mechanics , sentence
Some languages have simple grapheme‐phoneme codes in which there is a one‐to‐one mapping, making them easy to teach and learn, while others have more complicated structures and are more difficult for teachers and students. There is now an increasing number of studies which demonstrate that readers in more transparent orthographies such as Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and German have little difficulty in decoding written words, while English children have many more problems. Increasingly, lack of orthographic transparency in English is seen as having a powerful negative effect on the development of literacy skills in English‐speaking children. In the present study, the word factors associated with poor spelling in 5 school year‐groups (ages 7 to 11 years) are identified as: (a) frequency of the word in the English language, (b) length of the word and (c) a measure of the phoneticity of the word. The concept of word phoneticity is explored and data is presented illustrating the predictive model of spelling. The implications the model has for teaching and learning English are discussed, with particular reference to the beneficial effects that greater orthographic transparency would have for children.