Dear Teacher: Common Reasons for Misspelling

What are some of the reasons for the misspellings many students make? What are some ways to avoid them?

— Good Speller

First of all, parents need to understand that spelling is not a simple skill for children to master. It is tough for a lot of children and even some adults. Spelling involves thinking about how words sound and then translating the sounds into print. Reading, on the other hand, is just recognizing what is there — not that this is to imply that it is easy to learn to read. Nevertheless, most young children are far better readers than spellers.

There are three groups of children who are likely to have greater difficulties with learning to spell words. Dyslexics have problems isolating sounds in words and turning them into letters. And spelling is also difficult for those with dysgraphia as they have physical problems writing or typing words. The last group of children are those with auditory processing problems.

When children first begin to spell words, they do not have down pat spelling rules or the sounds of individual letters, especially short vowels. So they use just a few letters to spell a word. This early spelling (common with 5- and 6-year-old children) is called inventive spelling and is not caused for the same reason as misspellings of older children and adults. If you are curious about the words that are commonly misspelled, just search online for lists. You will easily find the 100 most commonly misspelled words as well as those misspelled by grade level. Fortunately, 85 percent of all words follow sound to letter correspondence, and many others follow a few basic rules with few exceptions. The spelling of the remaining words simply will have to be memorized.

Once children have grasped the basics of spelling and have had serious spelling instruction, there are a number of situations in which they are likely to misspell words. Here is a list of the most common reasons children misspell words:

One of the most common of all is the use of homophones (words that are pronounced the same but mean different things depending on how they are spelled). Some very common examples of these misspellings are: to/two/too; you’re/ your; they’re/their/there; are/our and it’s/its. It takes considerable instruction for children to learn to spell homophones correctly.
Another cause of spelling errors in the early grades as well as in later grades — even high school — is the mispronunciation of words. This is especially true of unfamiliar words in textbooks.
Students may forget to double letters in words such as committee, embarrass, and tomorrow.
Words may be written as one word when they are actually two (every day not everyday, thank you not thankyou, and all right not allright).
Students may not realize that some common words have silent consonants and misspell them as caracter and enviroment.
While spelling does follow some rules, students may not have learned the exceptions to these rules, or there may be too many exceptions for a rule to have value.
And in this day of doing so much schoolwork on the computer, misspellings may simply be typing errors.

There are ways to reduce children’s spelling errors. Begin by encouraging the use of spellcheck so children become aware of the errors they are making. Next, a list of their commonly misspelled words should be made. The list should then be studied to see if there is a pattern to the words that are misspelled. If so, this is the problem that should be addressed. It is best if instruction on spelling these words correctly is given by the teacher, and a few of these words are added to the weekly spelling test. If not, parents can work on the list with their children.

Parents should send questions and comments to dearteacher@dearteacher.com. To learn more about helping children succeed in school, visit the Dear Teacher website.