by Dr. Patrick Groff
NRRF Board Member & Senior Advisor

Dr. Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus San Diego State University, has published over 325 books, monographs, and journal articles and is a nationally known expert in the field of reading instruction.

The Rebecca Sitton spelling program allows teachers to mask failure to teach spelling effectively. Sitton wrongly rejects standardized spelling tests, which are meticulously designed measures that provide grade-level norms or averages of students’ spelling ability. From how well a student performs on a standardized test, one is able to learn how effective his study habits and instruction have been.

Invented spelling, or attempts to spell a word that one actually cannot spell correctly, is a practice to which even well-educated adults may at times resort. Often these adult-invented misspellings are inadvertent, that is, one makes them unconsciously.

Effective spelling programs in schools make sure that students use less and less invented spelling as they progress up through the grades. Often in written composition periods, teachers cannot attend to all students’ requests as to how to spell a word, at a given moment. In that case, students are directed to invent the spelling of the word they need at that point in their writing, by applying phonics knowledge for this purpose, and to continue on. Effective teachers circulate about the classroom noting such invented spellings, providing students with correct ones. The wise teacher has students write on every other line, so that correctly spelled words can be inserted easily.

Sitton’s approach to invented spelling is a perverted one. She defends invented spelling by claiming that children's creativity and self-esteem will be stunted if their spelling mistakes are corrected. Relevant experimental research does not verify those notions. To the contrary, there is a relatively high correlation between students’ ability to spell and their writing creativity.

Sitton claims that "very few spelling rules … are effective in teaching spelling." The empirical truth is that the more phonics rules a student has mastered, the more likely he will be able to spell words correctly. To master a phonics rule, a student must become consciously aware of the speech sounds in spoken words, and then understand that these sounds are predictably represented in writing by certain letters. Teaching students to spell speech sounds may be the most effective way possible to develop their mastery of phonics rules. Spelling words correctly also has the side effect of providing reinforcement for students’ ability to read words. That is to say, if a student can spell a word accurately, he invariably can read it.

Sitton improperly contends that "learning to spell a word involves forming a correct visual image of the whole word," and thus that "all words should be introduced as whole words." She misinterprets the ability of a person, who already can spell a word usually unerringly, to correctly observe that the version of it that he has just spelled does not "look right." Students who have yet to learn to spell a given word correctly do not have this ability. The "correct visual image" of a word, to which Sitton refers, occurs only after a student can spell a word, not during the period he cannot do so.

Learning to spell essentially is the process of becoming more and more able to detect and separate the individual speech sounds, in their serial order, in spoken words, and to remember the predictable ways letters are used to spell these sounds. Eventually, a student is able to recognize familiar spelling patterns in words and can read these spelling patterns without sounding them out. From then on, students also begin to spell words without making a conscious effort to say their speech sounds. For this mature form of spelling ability to emerge as soon as possible, however, students first must spell words by applying phonics rules.

The Sitton spelling program is based on a disabling false premise. Sitton wrongly perceives that the degree of difficulty a student will have in learning to spell a word is closely related to how frequently that word appears in published written materials of various kinds. For example, she theorizes that "through" will be less difficult for a student to spell than "got," since the former word occurs in writing significantly more frequently than does the latter. There appears to be no experimental evidence that corroborates Sitton’s hypothesis. To the contrary, there are many empirical studies that indicate if the words students are taught to spell are introduced according to how predictably they are spelled (how closely their spelling conforms to phonics rules), the greatest possible progress by students in learning to spell will occur. In that light, it is clear that learning to spell "got" is far easier than spelling "through."

Sitton presents lists of practices supported and not supported by research, yet she does not list research sources or note the method of research. There are two distinctly different methods of research used in studying how students best learn to spell: (a) the experimental approach, and (b) the qualitative (anecdotal, non-numerical) method. The evidence on spelling instruction gathered by the two research methods consistently contradict each other. For example, on the basis of the qualitative research it conducts, the Whole Language movement concludes that direct and systematic spelling instruction should be avoided. To the contrary, experimental evidence strongly supports explicit spelling instruction.

Sitton wrongly claims that:

• Spelling words always should "emphasize words needed in everyday writing."
• "Words should be presented as whole words, instead of in syllables."
• There should be no delay in teaching words that have "hard parts."
• A "correct visual image" of a word is necessary to learn to spell it.
• "There are very few spelling rules that provide the students with valid spelling direction."
• Application of phonics rules "must never take precedence over spelling" (meaning of statement not clear).
• "The only valid indicator of spelling success is consistent use of correctly spelled words in a writer’s everyday writing."
• "Self-corrected" tests "constitute the single most important factor contributing to spelling success."
• "Words should be selected on the basis of their frequency."
• Words students learn to spell "should not be words students are learning to read."
• "An emphasis on peripheral skills [e.g., application of phonics rules] will hinder spelling acquisition."

These statements by Sitton are not in harmony with the evidence from recent experimental research, which shows us that the most effective means of teaching reading involves systematic, explicit, comprehensive phonics instruction. This is the best way to give children a full opportunity to learn to read.

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