Jodi Carreon began worrying about her older child's spelling ability a few years ago, when the child was in second grade.
In Carreon’s southern California school district, students had returned to the classroom following pandemic restrictions. Each child had a laptop, a feature of distance learning Carreon thought would be phased out as schooling returned to normal.
But that didn't happen. Her child, she says, was expected to use Google Docs before they knew how to type, and could also access spell check. Though they were also practicing handwriting, her student wasn't coming home with spelling lists or tests, either. Carreon recalls wondering at the time how they were learning to spell.
"Over the next couple of years, I started to understand…they aren't explicitly teaching spelling in the way that I understood it to happen," said Carreon, a stay-at-home parent and co-lead of the advocacy group Distraction-Free Schools CA. (Mashable isn't sharing specific details about Carreon's children for privacy reasons.)
By the time her child reached the end of elementary school, Carreon decided they would benefit from spelling tutoring. She also knew that letting them rely on error-correcting technologies like autocorrect, spellcheck, and generative artificial intelligence would only mask the problem.
So she downloaded spelling lists from the internet and reviewed words with them every week. Carreon was improvising: "I'm not a teacher," she said. "I don't exactly know the proper way to do this. I would help them as best as I could, based on the rules I remembered."
Parents are on their own with spelling
What Carreon didn't know then was that many teachers no longer understand how to effectively teach spelling, and don't receive high-quality curriculum to help them, according to literacy experts interviewed by Mashable.
This may surprise parents of a certain age, who attended elementary school in the 1980s and early 1990s and likely became proficient spellers thanks to formalized spelling instruction.
While the literacy crisis frequently makes headlines, parents are less aware of the decline in formal instruction, which contributes to difficulties with reading, comprehension, and writing. There is no annual national spelling assessment and states generally don't explicitly test spelling, so it's difficult to know the extent of the problem.
Complicating matters are tools and products like spellcheck, Google Docs, Grammarly, and ChatGPT, which parents themselves might favor and which can make spelling appear an obsolete skill. But literacy experts interviewed by Mashable say that while such tools can be helpful later in a child's schooling, students must learn the vital skill of spelling or risk falling behind academically. Spelling may seem like an optional skill these days, but literacy experts say it's foundational for being able to read, write, and comprehend well.
Absent a nationwide movement to standardize spelling instruction, parents are in a position they dread: On their own.
Spelling struggles? What to do next.
None of the literacy experts Mashable interviewed blamed teachers for the lack of spelling instruction in schools. Instead, they pointed to a decades-long shift away from science-based literacy in favor of a since-debunked philosophy known as “whole language,” which posited, among other things, that students didn't need formal spelling instruction. Instead, the thinking went, they'd learn to spell through reading.
The abandonment of formal spelling instruction, beginning in the late 1980s, meant that educators stopped learning how to formally teach the subject. Nor are they routinely provided comprehensive lesson material that includes spelling, said Dr. Brennan Chandler, professor at Georgia State University who researches literacy and dyslexia.
"I really try to approach these conversations from a place of curiosity."
Even though "whole language" and the widespread curriculum that supported it has been thoroughly rejected by scientific research in recent years, spelling instruction has not recovered. Although most states have passed science-based literacy standards, spelling continues to be an afterthought, Chandler said.
Carreon had to cobble together at-home spelling resources for her child. She also initially approached her child's teacher and school administration about the role of technology in the classroom, using access to spellcheck in early grades as one example of concern.
"I really try to approach these conversations from a place of curiosity," Carreon said, noting that she's never taught in a classroom. She recommends parents ask their child's teacher or school about the spelling curriculum, as well as the value placed on spelling as a skill.
Spelling resources to consider
Chandler acknowledged that there isn't an obvious or well-vetted solution for parents facing this problem. Khan Academy, a go-to tutoring platform for many parents, doesn't offer a spelling curriculum, for example. Additionally, students need more than just memorization drills; instead they must develop an understanding of the English language.
Chandler recommends parents familiarize themselves with the rules that govern English spelling, which they themselves may have forgotten or never learned. He suggests the slim book Uncovering the Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling, and Literacy for this purpose.
Dr. J. Richard Gentry, an education researcher and co-author of Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching, says children need to systematically use the spelling words for the week, connecting them to broader skills, such as phonics, reading comprehension, writing, and building their vocabulary. His Spelling Connections series teaches the subject with this approach. Individual student guides retail for $30 each, but the publisher also offers school and homeschool packages.
Gentry recommends parents begin paying close attention to their child's spelling toward the end of first grade and continue monitoring it throughout elementary school.
Chandler acknowledges that little or non-existent spelling instruction puts children with an existing or emerging learning disability at a serious disadvantage. If most students in a class can't spell well either, it may prevent teachers and parents from accurately identifying challenges specific to dyslexia, for example.
That risk gets higher with the use of error-correcting tools and products like spellcheck and ChatGPT. Students with undiagnosed dyslexia can unwittingly lean on that technology to conceal their disability.
Deanna Fogarty, vice president and head of reading science at the literacy curriculum company Wilson Language Training, encourages parents to talk directly with their child's teacher about their spelling, particularly if they believe their child might have a learning disability.
Parents can ask the teacher about ways to support their child at home. Fogarty says the teacher will ideally offer more than a list of words to memorize, since that approach doesn't help students internalize the English language's coding system.
"If the support you're seeking doesn't [teach spelling] in a logically sequenced way, it's still going to be very random and probably not make the impact that parent would be looking for," Fogarty said.
Still, Fogarty said parents can seize the opportunities they get. If they're provided with just a list of words, Fogarty suggests looking for commonalities, such as a shared prefix or suffix. That presents an opportunity for the child to better grasp the rules that define English spelling.
Fogarty also recommends the website TextProject, a nonprofit literacy organization that offers a list of the 4,000 most common word families. She said parents tutoring their child could use the list to identify high-frequency words with commonalities.
Carreon wishes parents in her position could easily find spelling resources and support. In addition to at-home studying with her child, she's paid for tutors and taken advantage of writing courses for them.
"We're in a position to be able to do this," she said. "But not all families are, and that's my real concern."
