Scaffolded oral spelling encourages students to analyze words, rather than memorize them. This method plays a crucial role in promoting phonemic awareness and alphabetic understanding. It fosters the development of mental segmentation and blending skills, as students are required to process words based on their sound, rather than their visual appearance. As a result, they learn to hear and "see" the code in their minds, as they map oral speech sounds to a growing mental dictionary of stored letter-sound units.
Literacy expert Santoro underscores the importance of integrating spelling and phonics in early literacy instruction, a point that is consistently emphasized by reading researchers. This connection is crucial in laying a strong foundation for students' literacy skills.
“According to Perfetti (1997), spelling is the encoding of linguistic forms into written forms. Spelling reflects the general principles of the writing system, the writing system design, and the specific orthography that embodies the writing system and its distinctive features (Perfetti, 1997). Described another way, spelling is a multifaceted linguistic skill that integrates and depends upon several layers of knowledge: phonological awareness of speech-sounds in words, morphological awareness, semantic knowledge, and orthographic knowledge of the letter sequences and patterns that are used to spell words (Moats, 1984).” *
Analytical spelling, which encourages students to begin analyzing words and speech sounds at the earliest stages of literacy, offers significant long-term benefits. It instills the lifelong habit of studying words and even sentences. Sound analysis leads to word analysis and sentence analysis--a key factor in the development of proficient readers and writers. It's a simple truth that kids who learn to spell well, learn to read well and write well.
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