When children are learning to read, they’re actually learning how to spell. Unfortunately, this is a difficult process for many children, in large part because the way English words are pronounced doesn’t always have a clear connection to the way they are spelled. In English, there are approximately 40 different sounds represented by each of the 26 letters of the alphabet (there are more than 26 because, for example, the letter a is pronounced differently in the words call and fat and plane). However, there are well over 1,000 different ways to spell all the possible sound combinations! No wonder many children find it difficult to learn to spell, when even their teachers might have a hard time explaining why the words through and threw are spelled differently. By comparison, children in Rome learning Italian only have to deal with 25 different basic sounds and 33 possible spelling combinations.1
Learning how to spell means learning how to recognize the patterns that these letters make in combination. Part of this process is memorization of the rules of the English language, like the fact that the two-letter combination ch is a valid unit of sound (a phoneme) by itself, but that the two-letter combination hc is not. In a broader sense, learning how to spell in English is the process of learning how to visually recognize and remember the way words are spelled correctly. Because of this, it makes sense that children who are exposed to more correctly-spelled words – that is, those children who read more – will recognize and remember more words.
Encouraging children to read is one of the best ways to help them learn how to spell. The more texts a child reads, the more ways they’ll see words containing different letter patterns. Repetition is key to learning how to spell; this could be the repetition of taking one word and writing it over and over until you’ve memorized its spelling, or memorization of certain rules of English spelling. However, because children (and adults) generally enjoy reading for pleasure, learning spelling through seeing the same words over and over may seem like no effort, especially compared with the work of preparing for a spelling test. Any time you can combine fun with learning, you’ll encourage children to participate. In addition, reading aloud to and with children gives them excellent practice in both seeing how a word is spelled and learning how the spelling goes with the pronunciation.
1 Kher, U. “Blame it on the Written Word.” Time Magazine (2001).