Pretesting and Posttesting in Spelling Acquisition: Cross‐Linguistic Evidence From Contrasting Writing Systems

Understanding how cognitive mechanisms support spelling acquisition across writing systems is a fundamental challenge in educational psychology. We conducted the first controlled comparison of pretesting (generating spellings before instruction), posttesting (retrieving spellings after instruction), and copying (traditional transcription) across alphabetic and non‐alphabetic languages. In two preregistered classroom experiments with Mandarin‐speaking third graders, pre‐ and posttesting outperformed copying for Chinese spelling (Experiment 1) and English L2 spelling (Experiment 2) (Cohen's d = 0.26–0.74). At 24 h, posttesting most benefited Chinese spelling, whereas pretesting outperformed copying, but not posttesting, for English spelling. At 7 days, pretesting and posttesting performance converged, suggesting distinct yet complementary cognitive processes: Pretesting may engage anticipatory knowledge activation and attention focusing, whereas posttesting may enhance consolidation via retrieval. These findings support dual‐route models of spelling and challenge the predominance of copying in language instruction. Further, they offer empirical justification for integrating testing‐based pedagogies to improve orthographic learning across writing systems.