Does Learning to Spell Help Beginners Learn to Read Words?

IN THIS EXPERIMENT, we examined whether teaching beginners to produce phonetic spellings improves their ability to read words. Kindergarten students who could name letters but could not spell words with consonant clusters were assigned either to an experimental group that was taught to spell or to a control group that practiced matching letters to isolated sounds. According to posttest performances, spelling-trained subjects learned to read a set of words more effectively than controls. Their greater success was not because they had learned how to sound out and blend the words, but rather because they had become better at phonetic cue reading, which entails reading words by remembering associations between letters in spellings and sounds in pronunciations. Spelling training also improved phonetic segmentation and spelling recognition skills. Findings suggest the value of linking spelling instruction to reading instruction when children first begin learning to read.