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Reading and Writing

, Volume 30, Issue 5, pp 947–967 | Cite as

Spelling pronunciations help college students remember how to spell difficult words

  • Turkan Ocal
  • Linnea C. Ehri
Article
First Online:

Abstract

Studies have shown that children benefit from a spelling pronunciation strategy in remembering the spellings of words. The current study determined whether this strategy also helps adults learn to spell commonly misspelled words. Participants were native English speaking college students (N = 42), mean age 22.5 years (SD = 7.87). An experimental design with random assignment, pretests, training, and posttests assessed effects of the pronunciation strategy on memory for the spellings of 20 hard to spell words. Half of the participants were trained to read the words by assigning spelling pronunciations during learning (n = 21). The comparison group (n = 21) practiced reading the words normally without the strategy. Strategy trained adults recalled significantly more words, total letters, silent letters, and schwa vowel letters correctly than controls. Poor spellers benefited as much if not more from this strategy as good spellers. Results support orthographic mapping theories. Optimizing the match between spelling units and sound units, including graphemes and phonemes, syllables, and morphemes, to create spelling pronunciations when words are read enhances memory for spellings of the words. As a result, higher quality lexical representations are retained in memory. Results suggest the value of teaching college students this strategy to improve their ability to spell words correctly in their written work.

Keywords

Spelling Spelling pronunciations Overpronunciations of spellings Regularized spelling pronunciations Reading and spelling College students Spelling strategy instruction 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

Gratitude is expressed to Professors David Rindskopf and Alpana Bhattacharya for their guidance in the conduct of this study.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Program in Educational PsychologyGraduate Center of the City University of New YorkNew YorkUSA
  2. 2.Department of PsychologyUniversity of Minnesota DuluthDuluthUSA

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