The development of spelling and word knowledge in older students (Years 5 – 11)

Abstract

Abstract Language standards in the community are a recurrent theme of public debate and concern. They are rarely said to be rising, rather, to be falling. However, those in the classroom with the task of assisting students to learn to read and write are not the ones likely to pass judgment or attempt generalisations about standards. The writer investigated older school students’ (Years 5 – 1 1 ) word knowledge in a large scale empirical study. The development of 280 students across the seven grades in spelling and word knowledge was explored and the pattern of use of lower to higher order strategies by those students in their attempts to spell words, write derivations and display syntactic knowledge . There was confirmation that older students gradually make less and less use of lower order strategies in spelling, writing derivations and in use of homonyms in syntactic frames.