How are spellings actually learned?

[squashpie]

By which I mean, is it through learning all the graphemes (if that's the right word?) and then just getting a lot of writing practice, that the words finally embed in one's brain. Or does a child usually reach a certain age and then spelling just clicks?

Also, is there a resource anywhere which tells you all the 'rules' for spelling (even, perhaps, the origins of words to explain why some words use a "ur", like in 'curb', say, and other words use an "ir", like in 'bird'?) and also lists the frequently-used exceptions?

someone told me you need to read a word about 70 times to really digest the spelling.

Regarding how long it takes to learn to spell a word. Some folk might take 70 exposures (!) but a lot depends on what you already know, and how you go about memorising it. As an adult reader it is difficult to emulate a novice's experience.
Read this word, then try and spell it, then google it!

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Again, viewing spelling from a novice's possible perspective, try and spell

Добро пожаловать 

When teaching spelling, step one, make sure the subject can say the word easily, well enough to break it into syllables, or morphemes without forgetting bits, then break the parts into sounds. Then, remember any particular rules like dropping the 'e' or doubling a consonant, and word-specific correspondences.

Oh dear mumsnet does not let us use other scripts. The numbers above were in fact 'welcome' spelled in cyrillic, which served as a nice illustration of my point, I thought, now rendered meaningless. [buconfused]

For my daughter, spelling began to come together when she had done a great deal of reading. She became a fluent reader at the age of nine and her spelling ability dramatically improved over the following two years as she absorbed hundreds of books. She'd never had any spellings to learn, and very little instruction in spelling.

Now she spends plenty of time writing on the computer and that seems to be helping quite a lot too.

My experience was similar to my daughter's, but at a younger age: I arrived at school already reading and spelling proficiently. The words which I haven't learned by reading, I've picked up by writing.

Thanks for the apples & pears recommendation.

Can unfortunately say from experience that spelling doesn't automatically come from lots of reading - both my dd and my mum are obsessive readers, dd's spelling is patchy to bad for her age, my mum's is bad to the point of unreadability despite years of trying to improve it (and to the extent that she can't generally find words in dictionaries - as she says, people just assume that you can figure out how a word starts, she often can't).

support for spelling
letters and sounds

It all depends whether u think it's more important to develop your child's creativity or curb it for the sake of not misspelling words even if s/he is keen to write.

My granddaughter (5yrs 5 mths) wrote an illustrated page of A4 yesterday and although she 'misspelled' quite a few words (stering for staring, poot - put, dewing - doing, gowing, magick, wey, wot, carnt) I was hugely impressed and full of praise, as were her parents.

It's so sad that in English so many phonically perfectly plausible and logical spellings are 'wrong'.

Mashabell, I'm not sure that anyone here wants to curb their child's creativity.

Unfortunately, as my mother has had to face throughout her life, if you can't spell at least reasonably well, or (as she does) find a way to work around poor spelling then (a) people will find it hard to understand you and (b) you will be taken less seriously in the workplace, on job applications, etc etc.

Of course, no-one is going to criticise a 5 yr old for writing a story with some wrong spellings. But its different for a 9 y/o, for example, who tends to not include any vowels in her words.

Thanks for the link, Pilchard.

I was overwhelmed to see all the responses after the Easter break! Thank you .

The Promethean Trust website and all their books look fantastic. My DS is 7, in year 2. He's not a terrible speller, apparently, but I would like to help him as much as I can and I just don't know anything about how it is learned/ taught. The Apples and Pears/ Dancing Bears books look like exactly what I was after but I'm a bit unsure where I should start him? He's a super reader - ORT level 14 at school, reading Harry Potter etc. at home - but middle group for spellings and so I don't know where I should place him in the Promethean Trust workbooks. Does anyone have any advice on that?

Yes indeed,squashpie, you will find on their website a 'placement test'. Use this then you will know where to start.
www.prometheantrust.org/admin/files/placement.pdf

Thanks malaleuca: must've missed that in my pre-midnight haze!

Squashpie
If your son is reading Harry Potter and is in the middle group for spelling, u really have no reason to worry or to do anything extra at all. U can be pretty certain that the top spelling group will consist mainly of girls. Boys tend to be less good at illogical memorisation and rote-learning and so generally take a bit longer to learn to spell. Among adults woment tend to be better spellers too, on the whole.

U certainly don't need to buy any extra resources. Just ask him to look at the words he misspells and get him to pay more attention to those.

Takver
I know that 'correct' spelling is generally regarded as hugely important and that teachers and parents have to do their best to get children to learn them. We have to try and find ways of making all that brute rote-learning which it necessitates more palatable: englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2010/11/english-spelling-rules.html

I just feel sad that English-speaking children have to spend so much time memorising spelling irregularities which are essentially stupid and pointless.
They have made your mother's life, and the lives of countless others, including my husband's and son's, much more miserable than need be.

Mashabell - sadly, I think a certain degree of regularity in spelling is very helpful. As a teenager going out shopping for my mum, just for example, I always had to get her to go through the list, telling me what it said, as I couldn't rely on being able to interpret it in the shops . . . .

I also think that if you can spell (I'm guessing from your posts that you can, at least to a reasonable extent), its easy to undervalue the skill. Its also very easy to assume that a good reader will automatically learn to spell. As I say, dd is a very fluent reader (insofar as reading ages mean anything, I was told at the start of yr 3 - so 7 years old - that hers was around 13 years). She still can't spell well at all, and it makes it very hard for her to put her thoughts in writing.

No-one has ever pushed her to use 'correct' spelling, indeed her teacher (as well as us) is always telling her that what she writes is important, not the spelling, but if you can't think of any way that a word might be written, it is very hard to write fluently.

She's also mostly been working in Welsh (entirely up to end yr 2), which is a completely phonetic language, and still needed lots of help separate from learning to read with figuring out how to turn sounds into writing (if that makes sense).

Takver - Regularity in spelling is indeed helpful. It's the irregularities of English spelling conventions (sea/see, me, ski; blue shoe flew through too...) that make learning to spell English so difficult and time-consuming.

Learning to read is invariably easier than learning to spell because it involves mainly recognition rather than reproduction, the difference is a bit like that between recognising a tune and singing or playing it.

(I'm a pretty good speller, although like most people quicker at spotting the errors of others than my own. But because English is just one of the languages I learnt, I have known for a long time that learning to read and write English is exceptionally difficult. The research which I did for
englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2010/11/english-spelling-rules.html uncovered exactly what makes it so.)

Have a look at the website www.mymumdesigns.com They have lots of really good advice on learning to read and also early maths resources. I've used it and it's been a huge help! :)

I think the question should be how are spellings taught? and I'm afraid the answer is sometimes inconsistently ...
some teachers rely on long lists of words that are sent home for children to memorise for a test later that week (the argument is parents like spelling tests because they can help)... which is fine for some children but for most they may get 10/10 in the test but won't apply that knowledge when writing. For some children seeing the word written down helps with recall so for these children reading certainly reinforces spelling, others find that writing the word in a joined style (with a finger tip on the table top) helps fluency, others say the sounds out loud (chant almost).

I find that working on words containing the same grapheme pattern representing the same sound over a week actually equips the child better when it comes to actually using what they have learnt.

www.phonicsinternational.com/unit1_pdfs/spelling_sheets_with_word_lists_unit_1.pdf

Mrz - If u teach 'broke, choke, joke, poke, smoke, spoke, stroke...' for a week,
children will able to use that spelling pretty well by the end of that week.
Ditto with 'cloak, croak, oak, soak'
and 'roll, scroll, stroll, troll'
or 'hole, mole, pole, stole, whole' in other weeks.

They don't do so great when they have to remember when to use which in less controlled writing - when it comes down to simply remembering which variant spelling applies to a particular word.

This has nothing to do with inconsistent teaching, but English spelling inconsistencies

do they not Masha? I must tell my class