The Relation Between a Systematic Analysis of Spelling and Orthographic and Phonological Awareness Skills in First-Grade Children

Purpose: As an initial step in determining whether a spelling error analysis might be useful in measuring children's linguistic knowledge, the relation between the frequency of types of scores from a spelling error analysis and children's performance on measures of phonological and orthographic pattern awareness was examined. Method: The spellings of first-grade children with typical spoken language skills were scored using the Spelling Sensitivity System (Masterson & Apel, 2010a); words were parsed into elements based on phonemes and then assigned a score based on the linguistic skills represented in the spelling. The children also completed more traditional measures of phonological and orthographic knowledge: an elision task and an orthographic pattern awareness task. Results: There was a moderate negative correlation between number of elements omitted in the children's spellings (e.g., the child did not represent a phoneme with a letter[s] and performance on the phonological awareness task). There also was a moderate negative correlation between frequency of orthographically based spelling errors (e.g., spelling an element with a letter[s] that could never represent that sound in English) and performance on the orthographic pattern and phonological awareness measures. Conclusions: These findings suggest that specific types of scores on the spelling error analysis provided information about the children's phonological awareness and orthographic knowledge. They also support continued investigations on the use of a systematic spelling error analysis for measuring phonological awareness and orthographic knowledge and highlight the potential utility of the analysis procedure in the educational setting.