See it, Don't Say it. Why “sound it out” isn’t sound instruction.
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A fourth grader brought his spelling list to my office at the end of the school day. He had not yet practiced any of the words, so I gave him a baseline test to see which words he might already know, thereby eliminating them from study. I asked him to spell the words to the best of his ability as I read down the list. I watched as he mouthed the sound of each word and spelled it based on what he heard. The result was 20% accuracy. As we reviewed his attempt, I gently pointed out the few that were correct and explained that most were incorrect because he was trying to sound them out. He looked at me with sad eyes and confusion. “But my teacher always tells me to sound it out”.
This seemingly innocuous instruction, is not harmless. It causes continued failure and frustration. The majority of words in English do not correspond with a one-to-one relationship between the letters and sounds —what is called the alphabetic principle. English spelling is not primarily phonetic or based largely on letters and sound correspondences. Rather, it is a combination of orthographically and phonetically regular and irregular patterns, and meaningful parts—what is referred to as morphology. English spelling, therefore, is morphophonemic--a combination of meaning and sound--rather than phonetic (Bowers and Bowers, 2018). English orthography relies more on meaning relationships between the origin of a word and its spelling, than the letter sound combinations that make it up.
But teachers have been trained to teach spelling using a phonics approach—matching letters or letter combinations to their sounds. Even at the first grade level many words defy this sounding out approach. Consider these common foundation words: the, was, said, of, have, are, as. Spelling them phonetically would result in thu, wuz, sed, uv, hav, r, az. Other words like walked have silent letters (the l) and a morpheme at the end (ed) which sounds like a /t/ and changes the meaning of the word to past tense. Trying to spell these words from a “sound it out” approach will result in misspelling and continued failure to spell correctly in English. They must be spelled based on meaning and a visual image of the word. And this is not just for words we call “sight words”. This is the best approach for spelling any word in English.
So instead of teaching students to “sound it out”, we should be teaching them to “see it”, call up a visual image of the word, reminding them that they have seen it somewhere, whether in a book, on a street sign, bulletin board or on their very own spelling list, and think of what the word means. By teaching students to use their knowledge of morphemes and roots and base words to spell, students learn the connection between meaning and spelling. And by relying on a visual image of the word, they have a permanent model to go back to for comparison to check if what they wrote matches the image in their head, rather than guessing from the myriad of options for English consonant and vowel correspondences. Adding the instruction of morphology (prefixes, suffixes, roots and bases) and visual memory equips students with all the tools to be accurate spellers. Checking that every sound is represented by a letter or letter combinations should be the last thing students do when spelling.
After giving this fourth grader the instruction to “see the word in your mind”, he had instantaneous and dramatically different results: 80% correct and a huge confidence boost in his ability to be a good speller instead of “the worst speller”.
