Some children are taught to spell when they learn to read; for these children, spelling and reading are integrated. Other children are taught to read without ever receiving formal spelling instructions. Whether or not we learn to spell correctly, the fact remains that spelling has to be accurate to convey the meaning of a written word.
Just as people who mispronounce words are hard to understand, people who misspell words are hard to understand when their mode of communication is writing. The question, then, is not whether spelling is important but how we learn to spell, and what the relationship between spelling and reading is?
I asked a 5-year-old who is in kindergarten to spell a few words that she already understood. She could orally spell simple words like mat, hat, fat, and even cat because she knew that the c in cat is said like k. However, given words that have a u in them, such as bull, she checked whether after b there was a u or an a. Similarly, while spelling the word box, she asked, “Is it a b or an o?” This child obviously shows some of the well-known strategies for spelling.
Clearly, (a) she knows the sounds of letters, (b) she knows that in regular words the middle vowel could have more than one sound, and (c) she has little difficulty in tasks that test phonemic awareness. Tasks for phonemic awareness might ask, “In the word ball, if you take away the sound buh, what will remain?” She says, “All.” You may wonder, then, about this girl who already seems to know phonological coding and can do phonological awareness tasks before she enters kindergarten.
Can she not simply translate her own speech to letters of the alphabet? How does she answer the above question about the ball? Perhaps she has a good guess about the spelling of the word ball and can eliminate the first letter of the word.
How does she spell? She does it in at least two different ways. She could spell some words as a whole; this is called “vocabulary-based spelling”. Just as she reads some words as a whole without analyzing the letters or the sounds in the word, she can spell very familiar words such as cat without breaking up the word into its component sounds.
On the other hand, even for similar words like hat and mat, she was observed to be using phonological analysis: huh, huh, and muh, muh, that is, her lips were sounding out the first consonant, followed by the same constellation of vowel and consonant that is common to cat, mat, and hat. The first consonant is called the “onset”, followed by a vowel and consonant constellation called the “rime”.