Spelling Rules. Or sux.

In this post, I will:

Look at the position of the Sounds~Write program with regard to (not) teaching spelling rules.
Highlight that this is an unusual position to take in structured literacy.
Note that there appear to be some rather wild claims made about kids’ inability to learn spelling rules, with little evidence offered for this position, and instead a dogged adherence to the mantra.
Trace the origin of this position back through Sound~Write’s lineage to the American Phono-Graphix program, and in turn back to Piaget’s child development theory.
Highlight some relevant shortcomings of Piaget’s theory and of Phono-Graphix’s selective application of the theory.
Point out that despite the speech-to-print approach claiming the position that it is a more accurate representation of the nature of the code, Sounds~Write’s not teaching spelling rules ignores major historical developments in the fundamental nature of the code.
Acknowledge an apparent tension between the need for explicit instruction and the prevalence of implicit statistical learning.
List some actual research evidence that shows children can indeed learn spelling rules.
Conclude that Sounds~Write could well be leveraging a very effective strategy to get more kids reading in classrooms faster than ever before, but may be doing so while sacrificing dyslexic children at the altar of an unscientific ideology, just as Whole Language did, especially in the realm of spelling.

Full disclosure: I am now an Orton-Gillingham Educator operating from a speech-language pathology clinic. However, there are also Sounds~Write resources in the clinic (including in my own kit). I operate on a “use the tools that work best for this kid’s profile” basis, and am always looking to improve my knowledge with an open mind. I am not wedded to one particular approach, paradigm, or program, and always invite correction from evidence. I am also a board member of Code REaD Dyslexia Network, and parent to two dyslexic children, so the plight of dyslexic kids is close to my heart. However, these are my thoughts only.

A lonely hill to teach on

“Spelling ‘rules’ in English just don’t work and cause confusion” Dave Philpot, John Walker & Susan Case, Sounds~Write UK

“Sadly, no-one knows what the [spelling] rules are and, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years of teaching, it’s that most children can’t learn and apply even the simplest of rules.” John Walker, Director, Sounds~Write UK.

I went looking for the ‘official’ Sounds~Write position on spelling rules because the following screenshots of a Facebook group Q&A made their way to me through a number of hands. I have no idea if it is genuine or not; these days it’s very easy to knock up a false record of something. As a matter of principle, I consider it suspect until proven true. Perhaps someone can attest to having seen it first-hand. But, regardless, it certainly does seem to reflect the stated opinion (above) of the director of Sounds~Write so, for the sake of the argument, I’ll treat it as a hypothetically true record of an actual post.

Here’s a transcript we can work with. Note that I have edited the following to contain what appears to me to be the obvious intent, rather than quoting verbatim and adding what may be construed as ‘snarky’ sic qualifications:

“Forget rules. There are no rules that are worth teaching and children can’t remember them. What you are not differentiating here is between reading and writing. If you’ve taught Unit 7, I’m sure that most children will be able to read words with a double consonant spelling. Try it! When you get to Unit 9 and have the opportunity to recycle the double consonants in words like ‘sniff’, ‘smell’, ‘gruff’ and so on, you’ll find your children are able to recognise the spellings straight away. What everyone finds difficult is spelling, especially when you now have more than one way of spelling a sound. It will be some time before students start to spell these words correctly. What they need is time, practice in reading and writing, and positive error correction when they make mistakes. Learning new code knowledge, as well as new skills, requires lots of exposure. Relax, it will come.”

I’ll say up front that I try to avoid the word “rule” when I’m teaching. I call them spelling patterns or conventions. I’ll use terms interchangeably here.

A quick look at just a few programs I can access shows Spelling Mastery, MultiLit SpellEx, SPELL-Links, Orton-Gillingham, PhOrMeS, RAVE-O, Spelling for Life, Tessa Daffern, Playberry, and even Speech to Print (Louisa Moats’ thoroughgoing teacher text which is eponymous with the approach to which Sounds~Write aligns itself)… they all teach spelling rules.

“Forget rules” would seem to be a lonely hill to die (or teach) on. To dismiss spelling rules altogether is to put significant distance between oneself and the pedigrees of some of the most nationally and internationally well-respected literacy programs, including those developed by internationally recognised literacy researchers and educators.

While it’s arguably a good marketing point of difference, one might reasonably expect such an extraordinary set of claims to be backed up by extraordinary evidence, but on the face of these quotes, it looks more like personal anecdote and bluster. Once you start digging, the reasons all start to suggest themselves, but let’s break it down a bit first…

What’s wrong with this picture?

“Forget rules.” This is a remarkably dismissive and seemingly glib response, which would appear to be seeking to establish (or hinting to be coming from) a position of authority. Quite frankly, it reminds me of something a cult leader might say in attempting to neutralise free thought. It would be less reminiscent of such language if it were followed by some hard facts and research explaining why we should forget rules. But instead, it’s followed by more unsubstantiated claims:

“There are no rules that are worth teaching and children can’t remember them.” Worth teaching on what measure of worth? This isn’t clear, but we may reasonably assume that it’s referring to utility due to consistency of the rules, since this is the most often cited objection to teaching spelling rules. You may be interested to perform your own assessment of this: e.g. see how many one syllable words you can find ending in “af” with a preceding consonant, that a primary school child is likely to encounter.

Children can’t remember spelling rules? This is an extraordinary claim. What is unique about spelling rules that makes them harder to remember than, say, 3×2=6, or how to use an addition algorithm? The second John Walker quote from above at least qualifies the claim by expanding it to say kids can’t learn and apply even the simplest of rules. I have certainly had kids come to me for tier 3 intervention who can recite that no English word ends in a ‘v’, having learnt that rule (impossibly!) at school, but have still made that very spelling mistake in the same session. Learning and applying are very different, but both can and do happen. Unless I, and thousands of other practitioners and researchers, live in an alternate universe to John Walker, this must surely be hyperbole, and not the kind of stuff on which you want to base pedagogical decisions.

“What everyone finds difficult is spelling”. That’s also a contentious claim. [Edit 13/10/2024 – Please see insert below] Treiman, R., Hulslander, J., Willcutt, E.G. et al. found a 0.96 correlation between reading and spelling abilities, stating “Our results suggest that word reading and spelling are one and the same, almost…”

On the back of research like this, it would seem that spelling is not much more difficult than reading. Until I’d seen this study, I certainly would’ve agreed that spelling is harder than reading. In fact, I’ll still go out on a limb and suggest that if comparisons were made between whether study participants were able to spell a word and later read that same word, progressing through words of increasing difficulty, we’d see that reading is easier than spelling.

But I will also go further out on a limb and suggest that the separate abilities to read and spell the same words would diverge sooner in that continuum of increasing complexity, for kids who have orthographic processing difficulties. For example, a typically developing reader in year 6 may be able to read and spell ‘believe’, while an unidentified dyslexic kid with orthographic processing challenges may be able to read it, and yet make several errors when spelling it.

[13/10/2024 – Having posed some queries to Prof Treiman regarding this study, I should clarify:

The 0.96 correlation between reading and spelling abilities is based on age-appropriate abilities. That is, reading and spelling are “one and the same, almost”, in terms of typical progression. That typical progression includes the fact people find spelling harder than reading. I haven’t gone out on a limb here.
I am indeed going out on a limb in suggesting a dyslexic kid’s separate abilities to read and spell would diverge sooner, according to Prof Treiman’s impressions and results. The study included a disproportionately high number of dyslexic kids.
Outliers were methodically eliminated in the study. I suggested that this could’ve favoured the high correlation, but Prof Treiman didn’t think so.
Taken all together, this suggests to me that my (and others’) perceptions of dyslexics being particularly poor spellers (relative to their reading ability), could simply be a bias. Prof Treiman also pointed to some other work that suggests dyslexic kids share spelling patterns common amongst younger students; with that in mind, it may simply be that their reading and spelling abilities are both at a lower age level – and hence still highly correlated – and in my case at least, this bias could be explained by the fact that I have no experience working with very young kids.
Regardless of the above, dyslexics are still particularly sensitive to the quality and nature of the instruction they receive, and the fact that everyone finds spelling harder than reading, is a strange justification for not teaching spelling rules.]

And this observation, dear reader, is the reason for this post. I am fearful that the wide adoption of any program that actively discourages teaching spelling rules, is likely to disadvantage dyslexic kids. Which is why I find the last sentence particularly haunting…

“Relax, it will come.” I must admit to being quite triggered by this. This sentiment is what parents all over the country have been reassured with by their teachers when they’ve raised concerns about their child’s literacy acquisition. Other versions include “don’t worry, they’ll catch up”, and “some kids just take longer”. Years of such reassurances have led to the early primary window of peak brain plasticity closing and adolescent diagnoses of dyslexia, and sometimes not until after schooling has finished. AERO research involving around 190,000 students showed that only one in five kids who are behind in year 3 ever catch up.

So, what’s going on here? Why does Sounds~Write take this particular stand against spelling rules, with apparently very little evidence to support it? To understand this position, I think we need to dig into the lineage of Sounds~Write.

Lineage

Sounds~Write has lineage in the American program Phono-Graphix.

John Walker was trained in Phono-Graphix and has stated that he sought to create a whole-class alternative. Original co-director (since resigned) Susan Case was also trained (and apparently trained others in) Phono-Graphix (as noted in this newsletter, p.4).

I also came across a report [this is an Internet Archive link – the site is down as at October 13, 2024 as a result of a data breach] that claims to have been prepared by Carmen McGuinness (co-creator of Phono-Graphix) for Read America, the clinic she established and later sold to a successor, in which the author claims (p.21 – Internet Archive) that the ‘third owner’ of Sounds~Write, David Philpot, was also trained in Phono-Graphix, though I’ve not yet read anything else to confirm that (though he was certainly a listed director of Sounds~Write in 2003 along with Mr Walker and Ms Case, and is publicly acknowledged by John Walker as co-creator). Another webpage from that site also makes claims about the lineage of Sounds~Write, and while I have been unable to determine ‘ownership’ of the site due to a hidden-registrant listing, the following case can be made regardless of whether that website is a reliable source or not.

My interest in the lineage of Sounds~Write is because the lineage of Phono-Graphix, in turn, is particularly relevant. A strong lineage between the two programs seems a reasonable proposition, even just based on the Phono-Graphix training of the directors of Sounds~Write, and the glowing review David Philpot gave (in 1999, before Sounds~Write kicked off) of the speech-to-print framework espoused by Dianne McGuinness (Carmen McGuinness’ mother-in-law) in Why Children Can’t Read.

Phono-Graphix in turn is heavily rooted in Piaget’s stage theory of educational psychology. The current website declares:

The nature of the learning child is that he/she…learns best as an active participant in discovery.

Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget said, “The child only deeply understands that which (s)he has created”. Through directed discovery the Phono-Graphix lessons help the child to create a schema for the code that is based on its true nature and the way children learn.

The term “discovery learning” is likely to be a massive red flag to many readers and incline them to tar Phono-Graphix with a Whole Language brush. Phono-Graphix is, largely, anything but Whole Language, and actually stands in vocal opposition to it. I will also say that I personally do not have a problem with directed discovery learning, provided it is very tightly directed, achieves better results (or the same results but in less time) than explicit instruction, and only expects inquiry to occur from a mastery of the requisite background knowledge. The problem with discovery learning is that it very rarely is so tightly directed. I will argue that, unfortunately, Phono-Graphix and Sounds~Write, as a result of their fundamental principles, also likely fail to achieve this with regard to spelling.

In a nutshell, the problem, as I see it, is that Phono-Graphix and Sounds~Write make an arbitrary distinction between what should and should not be taught explicitly. Actually, I suspect it’s worse than that… I believe it’s more likely to be an ideological decision.

The reason, I suspect, that these programs refuse to teach spelling rules (quite uniquely for otherwise explicit instructional programs), is because Piaget believed kids in the “preoperational” stage of development (around 2-7 years old), are unable to engage in logical manipulation of information. Instead, he thought, they think symbolically in this phase.

That is, it’s perfectly ‘allowable’ (and even encouraged) under a Piagetian world-view, to teach that letters are symbols, or pictures, for sounds. That fits perfectly within Piaget’s emphasis on symbols for kids of that age group. But Phono-Graphix clearly takes the view that it’s really not okay within a Piagetian view to then try and impose a logic on when and why those symbols are used (for example, “ff” usually represents the /f/ sound in a one syllable word immediately after a single vowel). That’s far too much of a logically-driven interdependence for a preoperational child to learn.

Now recall John Walker’s contention that “most children can’t learn and apply even the simplest of rules”. I may be barking up the wrong tree, but this claim certainly seems to make more sense, viewed through the Phono-Graphix lineage of Sounds~Write, based in Piaget’s preoperational stage in which kids can’t work with logic. Note also that in his review of Dianne McGuinesses’ book, David Philpot stated:

“Dr. McGuinness’s book came as a real eye-opener and has totally informed and changed my thinking about the tuition of reading… Having determined what needs doing [i.e. a speech-to-print approach], Dr. McGuinness draws her ideas on teaching methods from standard learning theory and is most influenced by Montessori’s discovery method of learning…”

So we do have at least one of the directors of Sounds~Write on record as having their thinking informed by Dianne McGuinness, and contending that she herself was most influenced by discovery learning.

This influence from Piaget is, I think, the short answer to the question Lyn Stone posed in her “Culty as charged” blog post: “If you’re a fan of systematic teaching, what’s stopping you from teaching the [spelling] rules systematically so that more kids can build their lexicon?” It seems to me that what’s stopping them is that they believe (or believe that they are supposed to believe) that kids can’t learn logic-based rules, because that’s what Piaget thought.

In the Phono-Graphix program, spelling choices are (hopefully) learnt during ‘discovery reading and mapping’. Exposure is also the instructional tool of choice for developing spelling in Sounds~Write, if there’s any truth in the Facebook post above.

French cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, in his book How We Learn, pays due homage to “the great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget”, but also notes that his theories have not all stood the test of time and scientific advance. Commenting on Montessori’s and Piaget’s focus on discovery learning, he writes:

“The theory is attractive… Unfortunately, multiple studies, spread over several decades, demonstrate that its pedagogical value is close to zero… when children are left to themselves, they have great difficulty discovering the abstract rules that govern a domain, and they learn much less, if anything at all.”

Drawing the line

Let’s look now at why I think the ideological line that Phono-Graphix and Sounds~Write have drawn, is (scientifically) in the wrong place. I’ll look at that from two perspectives: the nature of the code, and the actual evidence.

The nature of the code

Phono-Graphix makes a reasonable claim that it was designed around the nature of the code (i.e. letters are pictures of sounds, sound pictures can be represented with more than one letter, all sounds can be represented by more than one picture, some sound pictures can represent more than one sound.) These are all great starting points, but none of these very important points comes anywhere close to defining an additional, fundamental fact about of the nature of the code.

That fundamental fact is an historical one. The code as we know it now, does have rules for spelling choices. Hundreds of years ago, not so much – provided you could make yourself understood in writing, no-one cared if you wrote “boat’ or ‘bote’. But, as a result of lexicographers like Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster – who sought to wrangle the vagaries of the different customs and influences of prior centuries into a standardised orthography through a systematic approach to spelling – there is now a correct and incorrect way to spell the overwhelming majority of words. They didn’t make their dictionaries by rolling dice, they did it by adopting and extending spelling conventions to apply in their dictionaries.

To not teach these conventions – which give us the basis for why so many of our words are spelt as they are – is bizarre.

Or, to express it another way, how do we expect children to achieve systematic consistency in their spelling when, for centuries, adults (including very well educated ones) – left to their own devices – never did? It took a concerted effort to standardise spelling with spelling rules.

The fact that many children do learn to spell correctly without much explicit instruction in spelling rules, is of course an argument for not spending time on teaching spelling rules. And, indeed, researchers have gathered evidence that children learn ‘graphotactics’ at an early age – they can begin to learn probabilities about their language’s spelling patterns even before they can actually read. On the flipside, however, this is also suggestive that Piaget’s conception of the preoperational stage is devoid of depth: not only are children capable of learning a logical system, they’re capable of learning it unconsciously. This is what researchers refer to as implicit statistical learning.

This fact will come as no surprise to many folks who have been trained in a spelling program that does teach spelling rules. Many such folks will have already had their moments of surprise when they learnt that there are rules that actually explain why we spell “kit” and “cat” with the particular letter representing the /k/ sound that we do. They had a lifetime of spelling words correctly without even being aware of the spelling conventions.

These realities, then, are nuanced: on the one hand, we have Dehaene saying research shows kids won’t learn the rules of a domain without explicit instruction, while on the other hand, we have researchers demonstrating that kids do have the capacity to learn implicitly (a capacity which Dehaene is fully aware of), and ‘picking up’ some of the likely patterns in spelling even at a pre-reading age. Then we have Piaget and John Walker saying most kids can’t learn even the simplest of spelling rules, while Walker apparently expects all kids to learn them implicitly through discovery.

There is no paradox here, though. The seeming contradiction is partially bridged by the fact that some kids are very good orthographic processors. They will learn to spell words quickly, with few exposures. The problem, as I see it, is that a program like Sounds~Write may further privilege these kids capable of implicit statistical learning of orthography, and simultaneously further disadvantage the kids with orthographic processing issues. These are the kids who, for example, might already be reading for pleasure, but still make seemingly random spelling choices and have no inkling of “that doesn’t look right” for things that come out of their own pen.

The part of the apparent contradiction that hasn’t been bridged, is simply an artefact of our lack of knowledge, and not necessarily a contradiction at all. We simply don’t know the details of just how much explicit instruction is required to optimise implicit statistical learning, or whether these facets of learning even have that kind of interaction, or operate on completely different levels, or, if so, for which subset of kids, and under what conditions. But the important difference in viewpoints on such matters is that a researcher like Dehaene is likely to be interested in identifying, with evidence, answers to those questions, while Sounds~Write is effectively claiming, doggedly, to know that balance already, apparently based only on the lineage of an interpretation of Piaget.

I’m not suggesting it’s easy to draw the line. While we don’t actually know how the brain stores its knowledge of words, their pronunciations, meanings, and spellings (there are multiple competing theories and models about this), we do know there are testable strengths and weaknesses in a child’s cognitive profile that are associated with strengths and weaknesses in reading and spelling (for example, working memory, phoneme awareness, rapid naming, orthographic processing). And we know these facets of a profile occur on continuums, and the combination of strengths and weaknesses can be completely different from one child to the next. Catering for these different strengths and weaknesses is never going to be possible without having a shortfall in one area for some kids, and opportunity costs in those areas for other kids. Where to spend instructional time is not a line that can be perfectly drawn for a classroom full of kids.

I will also say that I can certainly conceive of a program like Sounds~Write getting a majority of kids reading faster. That could, in theory (if those kids are good orthographic processors and good implicit statistical learners) mean that their orthographic mapping will happen faster (through more exposure) and therefore their spelling will be more likely to adhere to the rules, sooner.

But, by denying the opportunity to explicitly learn the spelling rules (which lexicographers methodically applied to our language), such a program seems likely to widen the gap between dyslexics and typically developing readers even further, by catering to the strengths of the latter and ‘punishing’ the weaknesses of the former.

And the fact that this design decision seems to be based on a rigorous ideological adherence to a model of child development (i.e. the inability to apply logic in the preoperational phase) is particularly problematic… it makes dyslexics a particular victim of an instructional ideology, just like Whole Language did.

Drawing lines across lines

The tragedy of this apparent discrimination is that the creators of the Phono-Graphix program have made an arbitrary choice to only class spelling rules as the particular ‘rules’ they wouldn’t teach. Let me explain…

I used to be a systems analyst. Let’s pretend that I have been asked to analyse the ‘system’ of the code that the Phono-Graphix folks describe on their website (you may want to check that page out so you can follow where I’m going here) as ‘concepts’ (letters are sound pictures, sound pictures can be represented with more than one letter, all sounds can be represented by more than one picture, some sound pictures can represent more than one sound).

As a systems analyst, I would list these points (which Phono-Graphix calls ‘concepts’) in my resultant systems analysis document under the heading “business rules”. That’s because these facts about the code which Phono-Graphix chooses to call ‘concepts’, are actually precepts: they are rules about the English writing system, and rules which they have chosen to explicitly teach. The spelling rules, which are equally vital to understanding how modern English orthography works, they have chosen to not teach. These are arbitrary decisions.

One might argue (as Phono-Graphix seems to) that they’re not arbitrary decisions and that, instead, the symbol-equivalence they invoke in their explanation makes those decisions a solid design feature of the program, because kids understand symbols. E.g. oa, o_e, ough are all pictures of the same sound, just like three different pictures of flowers are all recognisable to a child as flowers, so it’s okay to teach that ‘concept’ explicitly. I’d contend that no, the fact that they can draw an analogy between these particular rules and a child’s ability to work with symbols doesn’t mean that they’re not still rules. Nor does it mean that they’re uniquely suited to being grasped by a child, while spelling rules aren’t. In fact, that’s easily demonstrated using the same approach that Phono-Graphix uses.

For example, the rule that ‘j’ doesn’t usually occur at the end of an English word could just as easily have been explained analogously as a ‘concept’ that a kid can understand: this particular flower never grows in full sun, while these flowers do. Or, yes, a triangle and a square can also join together to make a house, but the triangle goes on top, not the bottom, otherwise it’s not a house…

Evidence for spelling rules

So, all the discussion of ideology aside, can children actually learn and apply spelling rules?

Here are a few studies that certainly suggest so;

Contrary to the claim that children can’t learn spelling rules, this suggests that they can, and that it’s more effective to teach them. If there’s more research evidence suggesting otherwise (for example, due to excess cognitive load, opportunity cost, or simply solid empirical evidence that as yet has no explanation), then the overwhelming majority of structured literacy programs should be taking note.

One of the enormous advantages of working with kids in a speech-language pathology clinic is that we have the tools at hand to find out what the strengths and weaknesses in a child’s profile are, which can help understand where the bottleneck is occurring and what’s likely to help. Anecdotally, I’ll say that kids with weak orthographic processing cling to any guidance that spelling patterns can offer, like a drowning person clings to a lifering. The fact that there are some conventions that are highly reliable can be the thing that gets a lot of kids curious and confident enough to engage with intervention (especially if they’ve come from a class where they’ve literally been taught that ‘English makes no sense’… as though our modern dictionaries weren’t the result of many years of combined work to establish some order amongst chaos).

This, of course, needs to be tempered with the fact that for a weak orthographic processor, many spelling choices are (unless one knows their history), effectively still random choices – especially with regard to vowel sounds. Rules will only get you so far.

Final thoughts

As I’ve said, I think it’s completely possible that Sounds~Write could get typically developing kids reading faster (after all, there has to be some reason for its growing popularity). I’ve also personally heard from parents stating that their dyslexic child found Sounds~Write easier to learn to read with than Orton-Gillingham, because, they conjectured, of the additional cognitive load that spelling rules create.

On the other hand, it’s possible that any such advantages come at the expense of spelling, or – turning that on its head again – may actually improve spelling by giving more opportunity for more implicit learning because reading rate has increased. But that’s something that should be researched. Until then, we shouldn’t pretend that kids can’t learn spelling rules, just because Piaget thought that kind of learning was beyond them. That’s effectively an ideological position which scientific evidence has proven to be false.

Whether there is a valuable trade off to be made is a valid question that is worth asking but, again, it should be asked, not assumed. For example, is it valid to sacrifice spelling competency to gain reading competency faster (there’s certainly an argument that reading opens more doors than spelling). Or could it be that sacrificing practising spelling rules to instead focus on increasing reading skill at a faster rate might actually ultimately pull spelling along with it due to implicit statistical learning. That seems to be the contention of Sounds~Write, but is there any evidence?

If there’s not that evidence, then, even assuming that Sounds~Write does get kids reading faster, if they are going to stick to their position of not using spelling rules, will they recommend a tier 3 intervention program that does teach spelling rules? As I understand it, their current position is that no other program should be used alongside. Which is problematic, because every tier 3 interventionist I’ve spoken to agrees that it’s much harder to shift the needle on spelling. It’s the kids with weak orthographic processing who need every tool they can get, in their toolbox. If Sounds~Write refuses to put spelling rules in the toolbox, that seems to be putting a subset of dyslexics at a deep disadvantage. For Piaget’s benefit.