Develop. Med. Child Neurol. 198 1, 23, 83-9 1

The Organisation of Motor Patterns for Spelling: an Effective Remedial Strategy for

Backward Readers Lynette Bradley

Introduction Knowing how to spell a word correctly

poses a problem for many children and adults. Although reading and spelling problems often go together (Boder 1973), many backward readers seem to overcome their reading difficulties but not their spelling problems (Naidoo 1972, Nelson and Warrington 1974). Frith reports cases of people who have n o trace of a reading difficulty although severely handicapped by their inability to spell (Frith 1980), and indeed the two skills have been shown to be independent to some extent in young children learning to read for the first time (Bradley and Bryant 1979). It will be important therefore to consider remedial methods which concentrate on spelling.

Remedial spelling method This paper describes a remedial

technique which has proved to be surprisingly helpful for both children and adults whose reading and/or spelling problems were severe enough to warrant clinical referral. With such a diverse population, their abilities and needs varied widely; some could read but not

spell, while others could neither read nor spell. Some of the children did not even know the names or sounds of letters. It was soon obvious that this remedial technique met the needs, however diverse, of most of these people, and that it seemed to work when all else had failed.

The method consists of a series of steps in the following order: (1) The student proposes the word he wants to learn. (2) The word is written correctly for him (or made with plastic script letters). (3) The student names the word. (4) He then writes the word himself, saying the alphabetic name of each letter of the word as it is written. (5) He names the word again. He checks to see that the word has been written cor- rectly: this is important, as backward readers are often inaccurate when they copy (Bradley 1979). Repeat steps 2 to 5 twice more, covering or disregarding the stimulus word as soon as the student feels he can manage without it. (6) The student practices the word in this way for six consecutive days. The pro- cedure is the same whether or not the student can read or write, and whether or

Research Officer, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road,

83 Oxford OX1 3UD.

SPELLING: AN EFFECTIVE REMEDIAL STRATEGY

not he is familiar with all the sound/ symbol relationships, but it must not deteriorate into rote spelling, which is an entirely different thing.

The whole procedure takes only 30 seconds per word, and this one-week consistent training seemed to be so effective that the student would often remember the word six months later, provided he followed the instructions correctly.

This method is an adaptation of Stimulous Oral Spelling (SOS) described by Gillingham and Stillman (1956). Those authors suggest that the sounds and symbols of English be introduced in a systematic way, beginning with the smallest unit of the language, the letter. The phonograms a b f h i j k m p t are introduced first, and then the student learns to read and spell words that can be composed of these elements, for example ‘map’ and ‘bat’. But the SOS procedure is also recommended for poor spellers who can read, in order to learn to spell words not studied in the context of ‘rules’ and ‘generalizations’.

The main difference between the Gillingham and Stillman method and the adaptation of it described above is that the student immediately starts with familiar words from his own vocabulary, even if he does not know how to write any words or their sound/symbol associations. We found that if the students worked with words they wanted to learn and were helped to work out each word, using plastic script letters, and by recording and practising it using the SOS method, they did learn the words successfully. The student was then taught t o generalise from the words learned to others, again using the plastic script letters. This method is fully outlined by Bradley (1980~).

Often the word the student suggested seemed very difficult for someone who could not read or write. But a 10-year-old

boy may find that he remembers ‘monster’ more easily than ‘map’. Some ‘first’ words learned successfully have been: chocolate; articulated; engine; apple; daughter; and ‘airport crash truck’. Using the student’s own interests and vocabulary is a widely recognised approach, and definitely the most appropriate for anyone with a word-finding difficulty (Bradley et al. 1979).

Although the method seems to be successful in raising children’s spelling levels, and probably reading levels as well, there is so far no empirical evidence to show that it does so. However, empirical data on the effectiveness of any remedial techniques are scarce (Yule 1976, McKinlay 1978), perhaps because there are pitfalls in giving one group of children a particular technique and then comparing their progress with that of a second group. The great problem with this type of study is that the groups might be heterogenous, so the technique in question might work with some but not with other children (Boder 1976).

One way around this difficulty is not to compare the eventual spelling levels of experimental and control groups, but instead to use each child as his own control and to give every child some words to learn under one condition and others under another condition. One can then see which condition leads to better learning with each child. In the following training studies, backward readers were each asked to learn to spell some words by one method, and some words by another, to see which was more effective. One dis- advantage of this design was that the student could not suggest words from his own vocabulary.

This study therefore set out to answer three questions. (1) could any one remedial method be effective across subjects with such individual differences;

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(2) was i t possible t o show that this was so in a controlled study; and (3) if the method was effective across individual differences, why was this so?

Pilot experiment Subjects

The subjects in a pilot experiment were 10 children, all in normal schools but backward in reading and spelling. The teacher responsible for their remedial education did the training in the pilot study. There were nine boys and one girl. The details of this group are presented in Table I. Although the average I Q of the group (as assessed by the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) was 100, one child had an IQ of only 85. One child with epilepsy was subject to intermittent episodes of petit mal. Most seemed to have various combinations and degrees of poor visual memory for words, poor visual discrimination, poor motor control, and difficulty in analysing words o r blending sounds.

Procedure The words. 12 words were shown t o the

children, and they were each asked to write them. The 12 words were then divided into groups of four, so that any words which the children had spelled correctly were evenly distributed between the three groups of words. The groups of words were systematically varied between conditions. The 12 words were: one, ask, how, let, has, yes, talk, your, blue, cold, land, from.

Conditions. The words were presented to each child in three different conditions, with one group of four words in each condition. In the first condition the child was required to learn to spell one group of words by the SOS method. In the second condition a control group of four words was taught in an identical manner, except that writing was excluded; this method will be referred to as visual-auditory (VA) .

In the third condition the group of words was not taught; this will be referred to as untaught (UT).

Training method. In training conditions 1 and 2, each word to be learned was presented printed on a card. The child named the word. In condition 1 (SOS) he then wrote the word, naming each letter as he wrote it. In condition 2 (VA) the same child selected appropriate letters from a box of printed letters on the table, and placed the letters in the correct order to make the word, naming each letter as he placed it. In each of these conditions the child concluded by naming the word. This procedure was repeated three times for each of the four words in these two conditions on four consecutive days. Monday to Thursday. The training time took approximately 10 minutes each day for each child.

Testing. There were two post-tests, the first on the Friday and the second four weeks later. There was no intervening training. On each occasion the children were asked to write all 12 words.

Results The results were a striking confirmation

of the effectiveness of the SOS method (condition 1) . The mean number of words correctly spelled by the 10 children a t each test is shown in Table 11.

With the SOS method, 84 per cent of words learned were correct a t the first post-test, and 80 per cent of the words learned were still spelled correctly four weeks later. Only 37-5 per cent of the words learned in the control condition 2 (VA) were spelled correctly at the first post-test and this had deteriorated to 20.8 per cent after four weeks.

An analysis of variance, in which the main terms were conditions (SOS. VA and UT) and times of testing, showed a highly significant difference between the three conditions ( F 27.885, df 2,18, p<O.OOOI)

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and between the three times of testing (F 29. 188, df 2,18, p<O.OOOl). There was also a highly significant interaction between conditions and times of testing (F 17.974, df 4,36, p<O.OOOl). Tukey’s HSD test revealed that although there was no difference between the number of words spelled correctly in each condition at the pre-test, there were highlysignificant differences at both post-tests. As Table I1 shows, in each post-test the sos method proved more effective than VA Although VA was significantly better than no teaching at all in both post-tests, this difference was reduced between post-test 1 and post-test 2 (from p<O.OI to p<.05).*

Discussion Certainly this study answered the first

two questions. Sos was shown to be an effective method for teaching spelling to backward readers who had very different individual problems. But it did not answer the third question-why was the method effective across individual differences? It would have been easy to jump to the conclusion that since the difference between the two conditions was that the children wrote the words in the sos method, whereas in the VA method they did not, writing-that is motor patterns-must be the important in- gredient in the SOS method.

Many writers have stressed the importance of writing in learning to read and to spell. Fernald (1943) attributes particular importance to the tracing of words when learning these skills, although she suggests that the pupil’s finger move in direct contact ‘with the model. The Gillingham and Stillman programme was devised at the request of neurologist Samuel Orton, as a training technique for strephosymbolic children (Orton 1937).

*These results were repeated with a second group of four 1 I-year-old children, using more difficult words such as ‘unique’.

Hulme (1979) suggests that tracing produces a distinct motor memory trace and that this additional source of information aids visual recognition. The Spalding programme recommends that the teaching of handwriting should precede

TABLE I Details of children in pilot experiment (N = 10)

Mean3 for

age age* age* WISC Chron. Spelling Reading

100 Yyrs 8mths 6yrs 6mths 7yrs Smths

*Schonell. TABLE I 1

Mean number of words (out of four) spelled correctly by 10 children at each test

Con- Pre- 1st post- 2nd post-

(4 u7eek delay)

dirion* tesi rest tesi

SPELLING: AN EFFECTIVE REMEDIAL STRATEGY

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sos 1 . 5 3.6 3.5 VA 1 . 6 2 . 5 2 . I UT 1.4 1 . 4 1 .3

*SOS = simultaneous oral spelling; VA = visual- auditory: U T = untaught.

TABLE I I I Details of children in main experiment (N = 9)

Means fo r WISC Chron. Spelling Reading

age age* age* 100 l l y r s 7yrs lmth 7yrs Rmths

*Schonell TABLE IV

Mean number of words (out of four) spelled correctly by nine children at each post-test

Con- 1st post- 2nd post- 3rd posr-

(2 week (4 week delay) delay)

dillon* te,t test lest

sos 3 . 2 2 . 1 2 . 3 VA M 2 . 5 1 . 5 1 . 2 VA 2.0 1 . 1 1 . 4 UT 0 - 3 0.5 0 . 7

*SOS =simultaneous oral spelling; VAM = visual auditory motor: VA = visual-auditory: UT = untaught.

L Y N E T T E B R A D L E Y

reading (Spalding and Spalding 1957), and Peters (1970) suggests a reason for the popularity of this method: ‘The swifter the writing, the better the spelling. This is only to be expected, since the child who writes swiftly is accustomed to writing familiar strings of letters together and there is a high probability of certain strings occuring and recurring in English’.

However, the motor pattern on its own cannot be the answer. Many poor spellers write fluently but may nevertheless spell a word in several different ways on the same page of writing, o r they may consistently write a word incorrectly. They have never learned the correct motor pattern for that word. The correct motor pattern must be established, and it must be organised and practised. Children who are notori- ously bad at spelling have also been noted to be clumsy, i.e. to have problems with the organisation of their movements (Bradley 1980b).

To demonstrate that motor movement alone was not responsible for the success of this adaptation of the SOS method, another experiment was designed.

The experiment Subjects

The subjects this time were nine children attending a remedial reading centre. As with the previous groups, the children’s difficulties were seen to be individual to each child. The IQ range of the group (as measured by the WISC) varied by 40 points. Again there were histories of delayed speech, dyspraxia, disturbed behaviour, depression, poor language skills and epilepsy. The details of this group are presented in Table 111.

Procedure The words. On this occasion the children

were pre-tested at spelling words until 16 words could be selected which none of them could spell correctly. Therefore the

words were not familiar to the children. The 16 words were: sew, buy, toe, won, calf, suit, ache, sign, type, tear, soup, cute, laugh, tough, chief, juice. These 16 words were systematically varied between four groups.

Conditions. There were four conditions, three of which were as in the pilot experiment: condition 1 was sos (simul- taneous oral spelling); condition 2 was VA (visual-auditory); and condition 3 was UT (untaught). The fourth condition intro- duced was visual auditory motor (VAM), in which the child repeated the name of the whole word as he wrote it, but did not name the individual letters. For example, when learning the word ‘laugh’, he would name the word, name the whole word again as he wrote it, and name it once more after he had written it. If the child wrote the word incorrectly, this was abandoned and a fresh attempt was made to write the word.

The four groups of words were varied systematically between conditions, and the order of presentation of conditions was varied systematically between the children.

Training. Because three new strategies for spelling and 12 new words had to be introduced to each child, the first training session took approximately half an hour for each child, This time was reduced during the week as the children became more familiar with the strategies. (As the children were also being taught by yet another method in their classes, this added to the problem. In fact it was felt at this stage that the children were being so overloaded that the experiment would not be viable; however, these fears proved to be unfounded.)

All the training was done by the author. Each child was given four words to learn in each of the three teaching conditions (SOS, VAM. VA) on four consecutive days, Monday to Thursday. The order of presentation of the conditions was varied

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SPELLING: AN EFFECTIVE REMEDIAL STRATEGY

for each child in each training session. Testing. There were three post-tests,

one on the Friday and the other two after intervals of two weeks and four weeks. There was no intervening training. On each occasion the children were asked to write all 16 words.

Results' The mean number of words correctly

spelled by the nine children at each post-test, in each condition, is shown in Table IV. The results appear to show that at the first post-test the children remembered the three groups of words they had been taught better than those that they had not been taught. However, by the time they got t o the third post-test, four weeks later, although the SOS words still appeared to be better known, there seemed to be little difference between the words learned in the other two conditions (VAM and VA) and those that had not been learned at all (UT).

An analysis of variance, in which the terms were conditions (SOS, VAM, VA, UT) and times of testing, showed a highly significant difference between the four conditions (F 25.113, df 3,24, p<O.OOOI) and between the three times of testing (F 16.625, df 2,16, p<O-OOOl). There was also a significant interaction between conditions and times of test (F 5.218, df 6,48, p<0.0004). This was further explored by means of Tukey's HSD tests.

These showed that at the first post-test, all three teaching conditions (SOS, VAM, VA) were superior t o the untaught condition (p<O.Ol in each case). By the third post-test, however, only the SOS condition was superior to the untaught condition (p<O.Ol), and it was also superior to each of the other conditions (p<O.Ol in each case).

Considering how complex this learning situation was for these backward readers, these results are even more impressive.

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In a more realistic remedial situation, using the words the child wanted to learn, even better results might be expected. However, those considering using this method are reminded that the student must be taught to generalise from the word he has learned to those he does not know.

Discussion The question of why the Sos method

was effective across individual differences can now be answered. Simultaneous oral spelling is an effective way of teaching spelling to individual backward readers because it promotes the organisation of the correct motor patterns. Spelling, eventually, is a motor skill, but practising writing words is not enough, since after four weeks there was no significant difference between the number of words learned by the VAM method, a kinaesthetic strategy using motor patterns, and those not learned at all. The correct motor pattern for the word must be organised before the child learns to spell the word correctly.

But how does naming each letter contribute to this for backward readers, whose problems are so different one from another? To answer this we must consider not the individual differences in the children, but the reading and spelling processes themselves. If we are to read and spell we must use the alphabet, and the alphabetic code works by breaking words down into constituent sounds, that is units smaller than the syllable. The child learning to read and spell must come to understand that one unit of speech (the syllable) can be represented by more than one unit in the alphabetic script.

Liberman and her colleagues (1974) have investigated the relationship between the ability to segment speech into phonemes (sounds) and reading ability. In their study, children of four, five and six

LYNETTE BRADLEY

years had to learn to tap out the number (from one to three) of segments in a list of test words which was read to them. At all ages, deciding how many syllables were in a word was much easier than deciding the number of phonemes in a word. Children who had been able to tell the number of phonemes in a word were seen to be making more progress in reading in a follow-up study. The word ‘understand’, for example, has three speech units, or syllables, but the first of these speech units is represented by two letters (‘un’), the second by three letters (‘der’) and the third by five letters (‘stand’).

This complex and abstract relationship between alphabetic writing and speech seems to be a major problem in early reading acquisition (Rozin and Gleitman 1977). The child does not need to under- stand this relationship when he is talking: in spoken language, words probably are perceived in units which are a t least a syllable in length, and certainly not as combinations of phonemes (Warren 1972, 1976). Some backward readers would think that un-der-stand needed only three letters when they wrote it: others might realise that it needed more letters, but having a problem in analysing the number of phonemes in the word, would not know how many letters were required. Some words, such as ‘people’, are particularly difficult to analyse.

When he uses the SOS method, it does not matter if the backward reader cannot analyse the syllabic unit. He may not be

able to decide that there are two written units in ‘un’, three in ‘der’, and five in ‘stand’. Using sos, he establishes a one for one relationship between the spoken and the written symbol, as he names each letter as he writes it. In this way he is learning to label, to discriminate, to recall, to organise and to analyse through this multi- sensory method. The visual and the auditory modalities are linked through writing. This is why this method is effective across the individual differences found in our heterogenous groups of backward readers and spellers-it caters for different combinations of difficulties.

Although the student may use this method to establish a first link between written and spoken language when all else has failed, auditory analysis and organ- isation are still necessary if backward readers are to make progress in reading and spelling (Bradley and Bryant 1978, 1979). As the spoken word is abstract and transitory, this can be very difficult. One way of helping to make this task tangible, and to demonstrate how different words can share a common unit, is to use plastic script letters. This tactile method of learning to generalise from one word to another has proved effective with the most resistant backward readers when used in conjunction with the SOS method (Bradley 1980a).

Acknowledgemenis: I thank J. Hughes, U. Pearce and colleagues for their help and co-operation; also Dr. J. Hockaday, Dr. C. Hulme and Dr. P. Bryant for their help and encouragement.

SUMMARY A controlled training study is reported in which children backward in reading and

spelling were taught to spell words by three different methods. 16 words were selected and were divided into groups of four, each group of words being taught by a different method. As a control, one of the four groups of words was not taught by any method. An adaptation of Simultaneous Oral Spelling was found to be the most successful method. It is argued that these results demonstrate that the ability to spell correctly is dependent upon the organisation of the correct motor patterns for writing the words.

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SPELLING: AN EFFECTIVE R E M E D I A L STRATEGY

RESUME Organisation des scht.mes moteurs d’orthographe: stratbgie corrective efficace

pour les retards de lecture Une ttude d’apprentissage contrblt au cours de laquelle des enfants en retard pour la

lecture et l’orthographe ont appris a kpeler les mots par trois mtthodes difftrentes est dtcrite. 16 mots ont CtC stlectionnts et divists en groupe de quatre, chaque groupe de mots t tant appris par une mtthode difftrente. A titre de contrble, I’un des quatre groupes de mots n’a ttt appris par aucune mtthode. Une adaptation de la Simultaneous Oral Spelling (tpellation orale simultante) s’est montrte la mtthode la plus efficace. Les auteurs pensent que ces rtsultats dtmontrent que la possibilitt d’tpeler correctement dtpend des schkmas moteurs corrects d’tcriture des mots.

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Die Ausbildung motorischer Muster furs Buchstabieren: ein effektiver Behandlungsplan

f u r Kinder, die ruckwarts lesen Eine kontrollierte Behandlungsstudie, in der Kinder, die ruckwarts lesen und

buchstabieren, unterrichtet wurden, Worte auf drei verschiedene Arten zu buchstabieren, wird vorgelegt. 16 Worte wurden ausgewahlt und in Gruppen von je vier eingeteilt und jede Gruppe wurde nach einer anderen Methode unterrichtet. Die Methode des simultanen mundlichen Buchstabierens erwies sich als die erfolgreichste. Es wird hervorgehoben, dai3 die Fahigkeit, richtig zu buchstabieren, von der Ausbildung eines richtigen motorischen Musters zum Schreiben des Wortes abhangt.

RESUMEN Organizacidn del los esquemas motores del deletreo: una estrategia efectiva para remediar

a los retrasados en la Iectura Se aporta el estudio de un aprendizaje controlado en el que a 10s niiios con retraso en

la lectura y el deletreo se les ensefiaba a deletrear seg6n tres mttodos diferentes. Se selecionaban 16 palabras y se dividian en grupos de cuatro, siendo cada grupo enseiiado por un mttodo diferente. A mod0 de control, uno de 10s cuatro grupos no seguia ning6n mttodo. Se observ6 que el mttodo que daba mas txito era el del deletreo oral simultineo. Se arguye que estos resultados demuestran que la habilidad para deletrear correctamente dependen de la organizacih de 10s esquemas motores correctos a1 escribir las palabras.

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