Spelling Knowledge: Implications for Instruction and Intervention:

Many children with reading disabilities have difficulties with spelling, most likely because reading and spelling performance is moderately to strongly correlated. (Moats, Footman, & Taylor, 2006). In her article, "Learning to Read and Learning to Spell: Two Sides of a Coin," Ehri (2000) artfully described the reciprocal nature of reading and spelling, noting that both processes draw on the same knowledge base (memory of the alphabetic system and spellings of specific words) for development. Interestingly, decades have been dedicated to research on reading, yet spelling and its assessment and instruction have during the same period comparatively been vastly underresearched (Masterson & Apel, 2006; Vostal, Hughes, Ruhl, Benedek-Wood, & Dexter, 2008). In relation to students with learning disabilities, Ehri (2000) emphasized that teaching reading without teaching spelling may lead to students who are poor readers and spellers. Therefore, subordinating spelling instruction to an isolated instead of integrated aspect of literacy instruction marginalizes this important skill and at the same time the students who may need instruction in this area the most. The purpose of this special issue of the Learning Disability Quarterly is to begin to address this research gap by looking at spelling across multiple dimensions of teacher training, assessment, and instruction and by examining the implications for students with disabilities. The first article, by Carreker, Joshi, and Boulware-Gooden, describes the findings of two studies on spelling training and its influence on instruction by participating preservice and inservice teachers. The first case study involved 36 preservice teachers and 38 inservice teachers. The teachers completed a measure of knowledge of phonemes, syllables, and morphemes that assessed their knowledge through counting of each. The teachers were then asked to complete a Spelling Instruction Assessment (SIA; Carreker, 2007), which directed them to identify a student's underlying difficulty in spelling and choose the most appropriate instructional activity for remediation of that difficulty. The second case study involved 196 inservice teachers who attended professional development in literacy instruction. After completion of training, the teachers were administered the same measures as in Study 1. The authors discuss the importance of providing teachers, particularly teachers working with students who have or are at risk for reading disabilities, ongoing professional development spelling activities. Such activities should include ongoing mentoring focusing on how to use phonemic, syllabic, orthographic, and morphemic tasks to help teachers better identify students' needs and how to use data to design reading and spelling activities to meet those needs. The next article, a descriptive study by Calhoon, Greenberg, and Hunter, explores the sensitivity of commonly used standardized spelling tests and the implications of their use for measuring spelling knowledge. The authors analyzed and compared five standardized spelling tests and their alternate forms (when available) according to the following categories: number of syllables, syllable types, consonant grapheme types, and vowel types represented in each word in each assessment. While many of these standardized tests have demonstrated whole-word reliability and correlations with each other, the orthographic qualities of each word within each assessment have never been examined. Results indicate that the tests vary across these categories, even within alternating forms of the same test. Additionally, the authors note similarities and differences in administration (i.e., basal, ceiling) and purpose (i.e., screening, comprehensive) across assessments that could impact performance for students with learning disabilities. Based on their findings, the authors discuss the importance of developing more comprehensive spelling measures and providing assessment data in spelling for students with learning disabilities using more than one test, similar to reading, to ensure proper identification. …