Are spelling and reading, then, flip sides of a coin? If reading is usually described as translating spelling to speech, spelling could be just the reverse process of translating speech to spelling. To continue the analogy, remember that one of the major activities when children are learning to read consists of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, that is, being able to produce the phonological structure or, in simple words, to recapture the sounds of the printed letters, syllables, or words. Can we then say that spelling is a phoneme-grapheme correspondence? Will common sense support us? The answer is partly yes and partly no.
We should really think of the different strategies that children use in spelling. The pool of knowledge about how anyone spells a word is fed by many streams. For example, when studying patients with brain damage, we can guess not only what part of the brain, when damaged, shows up in what kind of language disorder, but also gain insight into the nature of language-related functions.
One of the facts that we learned from a study of patients with brain damage due to a tumor, injury, or deterioration of brain matter was that some patients could not spell a word after they had a brief look at it, while other patients could spell the word when it was written but not when they heard it spoken.
In these findings, we have to remember that when a written word is shown to a patient, or for that matter to a child, the time given for looking at the word is so short that unless they know the spelling of the word, they will not be able to reproduce it in writing. Along with these two groups of patients, there is a third type that may have the added difficulty of putting the letters into a correct sequence to form a word that they already know and are able to read. In these cases, knowing the spelling of a word may not always translate into writing the word correctly.
Are these the types of spelling difficulties we find in normal children or adults? Perhaps the answer is obvious to a parent familiar with the problems her child experiences.
Yes! I see that in my child who is in Grade 3. She learned to spell some of the words as a whole (a vocabulary-based spelling strategy). At the same time, she also learned how to sound out the letters in the word while spelling. I have also noticed that even when she knew the spelling of a word, when she wrote it down letter by letter, she would make mistakes in the sequence, especially in long words such as sequence or vaccine. She would do things like omit the last e, or make the majority of her sequencing errors in the middle part of a long word.
So, is reading like spelling and spelling like reading? The answer to the above puzzle is once again partly yes and partly no.