What to know about the spelling crisis exacerbated by tech

Jodi Carreon started worrying about her oldest child’s spelling skills a few years ago, when he was in second grade.

In the Carreon school district in Southern California, students had returned to classrooms following pandemic restrictions. Each child had a laptop, a feature of distance learning Carreon said would be phased out as schooling returned to normal.

But that didn’t happen. Her child, she said, was supposed to use Google Docs before she knew how to type and could also access spell check. Even though they also practiced handwriting, her student didn’t come home with spelling lists or tests either. Carreon remembers wondering at the time how they learned to spell.

“Over the next couple of years, I started to understand … that they weren’t explicitly teaching spelling the way I thought it was happening,” said Carreon, a stay-at-home parent and co-leader of the advocacy group. Distraction-Free Schools CA. (Mashable does not share specific details about Carreon’s children for privacy reasons.)

By the time her child reached the end of elementary school, Carreon decided they would benefit from spelling lessons. She also knew that letting them rely on error-correcting technologies like autocorrect, spell checking, and generative artificial intelligence would only mask the problem.

So she downloaded spelling lists from the Internet and reviewed the words with them every week. Carreon improvised: “I’m not a teacher,” she said. “I don’t know exactly how to proceed. I would help them as best I could, based on the rules I remembered.”

Parents deal with spelling on their own

What Carreon didn’t know then was that many teachers no longer understand how to teach spelling effectively and are not provided with high-quality programs to help them, according to literacy experts interviewed by Mashable.

This may surprise parents of a certain age, who attended elementary school in the 1980s and early 1990s and likely became good spellers through formal spelling instruction.

Although the literacy crisis often makes headlines, parents are less aware of the decline in formal education, which contributes to difficulties in reading, comprehension and writing. There is no annual national spelling assessment and states generally do not explicitly test spelling, so it is difficult to know the extent of the problem.

Complicating matters are tools and products like spell check, Google Docs, Grammarly, and ChatGPT, which parents themselves might favor and which can make spelling seem like an obsolete skill. But literacy experts interviewed by Mashable say that while such tools can be useful later in a child’s schooling, students must learn the vital skill of spelling or risk falling behind academically. Spelling may seem like an optional skill these days, but literacy experts say it’s fundamental to being able to read, write and comprehend well.

In the absence of a national movement to standardize spelling instruction, parents find themselves in a position they fear: alone.

Spelling difficulties? What to do next.

None of the literacy experts interviewed by Mashable blamed teachers for the lack of spelling instruction in schools. Instead, they pointed to a decades-long shift away from scientific literacy in favor of a since-debunked philosophy known as “whole language,” which posited, among other things, that students did not need formal spelling instruction. Instead, it was thought, they would learn to spell by reading.

The move away from formal teaching of spelling, beginning in the late 1980s, meant that educators stopped learning how to formally teach the subject. They also don’t routinely receive comprehensive instructional materials that include spelling, said Dr. Brennan Chandler, a professor at Georgia State University who studies literacy and dyslexia.

“I really try to approach these conversations with curiosity.”

Even if “the whole language” and the generalized program which supported it were completely rejected by scientific research in recent years, spelling teaching has not recovered. Although most states have adopted science-based literacy standards, spelling continues to be an afterthought, Chandler said.

Carreon had to put together spelling resources at home for her child. She also initially contacted her child’s teacher and school administration about the role of technology in the classroom, citing access to spell check in the early years of school as an example of a concern.

“I really try to approach these conversations with curiosity,” Carreon said, noting that she has never taught a classroom. She recommends that parents ask their child’s teacher or school about the spelling program, as well as the value placed on spelling as a skill.

Spelling Resources to Consider

Chandler acknowledged that there is no obvious or well-researched solution for parents facing this problem. Khan Academy, a go-to tutoring platform for many parents, doesn’t offer a spelling program, for example. Additionally, students need more than just memorization exercises; rather, they must develop an understanding of the English language.

Chandler recommends that parents familiarize themselves with the rules that govern English spelling, which they themselves may have forgotten or never learned. He suggests the thin book Discovering the Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling, and Literacy for this purpose.

Dr. J. Richard Gentry, education researcher and co-author of Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teachingstates that children should use spelling of words systematically throughout the week, connecting them to wider skills, such as phonics, reading comprehension, writing and building their vocabulary. Her Orthographic Connections The series teaches the subject with this approach. Individual student guides cost $30 eachbut the publisher also offers school and homeschool packages.

Gentry recommends that parents start paying close attention to their child’s spelling near the end of first grade and continue monitoring it throughout elementary school.

Chandler recognizes that little or no spelling instruction seriously disadvantages children with an existing or emerging learning disability. If most students in a class also don’t know how to spell well, this can prevent teachers and parents from accurately identifying challenges specific to dyslexia, for example.

This risk increases with the use of error correction tools and products such as spell checking and ChatGPT. Students with undiagnosed dyslexia may unwittingly rely on this technology to hide their disability.

Deanna Fogarty, vice president and head of reading science at Wilson Language Training, a literacy program company, encourages parents to talk directly about spelling with their child’s teacher, especially if they think their child might have a learning disability.

Parents can ask the teacher about ways to support their child at home. Fogarty says the teacher will ideally offer more than a list of words to memorize, because this approach doesn’t help students internalize the coding system of the English language.

“If the support you are looking for does not meet [teach spelling] in a logical way, it will still be very random and probably not have the impact that parents would be looking for,” Fogarty said.

Still, Fogarty said parents can seize the opportunities that present themselves. If they’re only given a list of words, Fogarty suggests looking for commonalities, such as a shared prefix or suffix. This offers the child the opportunity to better understand the rules that define English spelling.

Fogarty also recommends the website Draft texta non-profit literacy organization that offers a list of 4,000 most common word families. She said parents teaching their child could use the list to identify frequent words with commonalities.

Carreon wants parents in her situation to be able to easily find spelling resources and support. In addition to studying at home with her child, she pays tutors and profits from writing lessons for them.

“We are able to do this,” she said. “But that’s not the case for every family, and that’s my real concern.”