Abstract:
New theories continue to emerge to help us understand how children learn and
how to effectively teach them. We must be mindful, however, of the value of
previously developed and well-established theories. This paper presents findings
from a study that investigated the consistency with which children perform
within a given developmental stage of spelling. This study expands upon
previous understanding of the developmental stage theory of spelling by
examining children’s spelling consistency across a broad range of spelling
related activities (word lists, natural writing samples, editing activities and
word sorting activities). The findings of this study indicate that children’s
orthographic knowledge aligns very consistently with their current stage of
spelling development across a range of activities.
