Does Spelling Count?

by Carol Brown Dodson

"Does spelling count?" your students ask whenever they have to write something, whether it's a test, a writing assignment, or a journal entry. You typically respond with the admonition that spelling is always important. But then comes the next question from a student, "But Ms. Johnson, are you going to take off for spelling mistakes?" or "Is spelling part of our grade?"

During local scoring sessions which follow a district-administered writing assessment, heated discussions arise over such controversial areas as the following:

• Is the misspelling of homonyms such as "there" and "their" an error in spelling or word choice?
• How many spelling errors should be accepted before lowering the score on a holistically scored paper?
• Should students be "punished" for attempting to use difficult words which they might misspell?

Simple solutions for correct spelling are no more likely to be found in guidelines for assessing high-stakes tests such as the OGT than in classrooms. Because test makers are careful to distinguish between reading tests and writing tests, they intentionally do not consider misspelled words as part of the score for short-answer and extended-response questions on the reading test. That seems to be quite straightforward. But when misspellings interfere with the message, the scorers sometimes misinterpret the student's intended meaning and give a low score to the answer. In the case of mathematics, science, and social studies, the misspelling of a content-based term can lead scorers to the assumption that the student does not understand a concept.

One piece of advice to students, then, might be to take particular care to spell correctly words that they can copy from the question itself or from the passage that precedes the question. Of course, they should also be reminded to apply their knowledge of spelling to the entire answer. Proofreading their answers is valuable for catching spelling errors. When they find mistakes, students should know that they can correct the errors by drawing a single line through their original word and writing the correctly spelled word above the crossed-out word.

Spelling and the Writing Test

Unlike the reading test, the writing test requires attention to spelling. Two separate rubrics are applied to the scoring of students' writing. A six-point holistic rubric guides the scoring of such areas as emphasis on audience and purpose, clarity, and organization.

In addition to using the six-point holistic rubric, scorers also evaluate writing conventions through the use of a three-point holistic rubric. The holistic conventions rubric is used to assess understanding of grammatical conventions, including capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.

Scorers use the three-point holistic conventions rubric to determine whether or not the writing shows a student's consistent understanding of grammatical conventions. The rubric is applied in a holistic fashion, evaluating the student's use of all the conventions, including spelling. For a student to receive the maximum score of 3, the rubric states, "Few errors, if any, are present in capitalization, punctuation and spelling."

To discover how the "few errors" description is applied during the scoring process, I contacted Mark Lentz for clarification of some of the questions that surround the issue of spelling. Lentz, a language arts consultant with the Ohio Department of Education, sent a detailed, thorough response to the questions.

Question: How important is correct spelling on the test? Is it considered in both the writing applications and conventions rubrics or just in the conventions rubric?

Answer: Twenty five percent of a student's score on the OGT in writing is based on conventions. The scoring is holistic and is guided by a conventions rubric. The conventions rubric states that grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling are important. If a student's writing contains numerous errors in any or all of these areas and the frequency of those errors actually impairs the reader's ability to understand the writing, only one point is earned. If a student's writing contains occasional errors in any or all of these areas and the frequency of those errors causes some impairment of understanding, two points are earned. If a student's writing contains few or no errors in grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, understanding is in no way impaired and a maximum of three points is earned. The conventions rubric is the only one used to score students' spelling skills.

Question: Are scorers encouraged to ignore slight misspellings of difficult words, or should we encourage students to stick to words they can spell?

Answer: In response to this question, it may help to refer to the language of the conventions rubric for a three-point score. "Few errors, if any, are present in capitalization, punctuation and spelling." This is to say, a student may compose a response to a writing prompt on the OGT and misspell advanced or commonly misspelled words and still receive a maximum of three points. In holistic scoring, this takes into account whether the student has written one page of text or four pages. It takes into account the density of the writing (i.e., the number of words per page) and whether the spelling error is recurring or not. For example, when "preferred" is used four times in a response but is misspelled "prefered" three times, the negative impact on a reader is considerably greater than when three words like "derelect," "accommodate," and "plagiarism" appear once, and only the word "derelict" is misspelled. These are examples of holistic scoring, and scorers in training and through practice learn to apply it with confidence and ease.

Question: Are homonym errors (e.g., "their" instead of "there") considered spelling errors or word choice errors, or does it matter, given the way the rubric is written?

Answer: If a student uses "there" instead of "their," it is a word choice error. If a student uses "thier" instead of "their," it is a spelling error. If a student uses "thier" instead of "there," it is a spelling AND a word choice error. A student's skill in making correct and appropriate word choices is covered in the six-point writing applications rubric.

Question: Is there anything else you think I should share with teachers about spelling and the writing OGT?

Answer: One related question that may come up is, "What does a zero in conventions look like?" "What is too short or too bad to be considered a score of one in conventions?"

The Ohio Department of Education's (ODE's) scoring contractors use several codes to handle responses that earn a zero or cannot be scored and receive a zero. These scoring decisions are made on an example by example basis. Some written responses are too brief to "confidently" judge a writer's "control" over conventions. Under these circumstances, scorers are trained to direct the piece to a scoring captain or scoring director. These officials decide whether the response receives a zero or one point.

Resources for Teaching Spelling

Many rich lessons and other resources for teaching spelling are available on the ORC website.* Some of them follow, but by using the search engines of ORC, you'll find additional resources.

Spelling and Students with Learning Disabilities

In an article about students with learning disabilities, Louise Spear-Swerling offers suggestions for improving students' spelling. Although Spear-Swerling writes specifically about students with learning disabilities, many of her suggestions apply to all students. For example,

• Teach spelling of important grade-appropriate words.
• Encourage students to use knowledge about root words and relationships among words to help them spell new words.
• Encourage independent reading to increase exposure to printed words.

They Still Can't Spell? Understanding and Supporting Challenged Spellers in Middle and High School, Chapter 8, "Less but Deeper: Teaching Strategies and Rules that Generalize"

This book by Rebecca Bowers Sipe, available from Heinemann, is an excellent resource for use by English language arts or reading departments that are looking for ways to improve students' spelling and overall word knowledge. This chapter excerpt defines and explains reflective strategies that promote word awareness. The authors show how these strategies provide "deeper" opportunities for students to learn information about words that they can then generalize to other words. Included are word walls and ways in which to use them, poetry walls, literature circle word study, human words, card sorts, and investigation into spelling rules. Why and how these techniques and strategies encourage word study is discussed in detail, and a special focus is put on challenged spellers. (author/bcbrown)

You Can't Spell the Word Prefix Without a Prefix

This lesson plan from NCTE and IRA provides strategies that engage students in improving spelling and learning about words. Starting with the premise that word study is intriguing and fun, students work in cooperative groups to identify, define, and construct words using a list of preselected prefixes. Students guess at initial meanings and spellings of words, then correct misspellings using spelling strategies developed by their work groups. Groups use resources such as spell checkers and dictionaries to confirm and correct their spellings and definitions. To help assess comprehension, students write sentences for each prefix group the class has worked on during the lesson. (author/ncl)

Shared Spelling Strategies

This lesson by NCTE and IRA is designed to be used repeatedly during the drafting process. Although designated for grades 6-8, the lesson can easily be adapted to other grade levels. This repeated lesson helps students to develop and use effective spelling strategies during the writing process. While responding in writing to a previously read text, students are prompted to become more explicitly aware of the strategies they use. The goal is to encourage uninterrupted drafting, while allowing students to slow down briefly to consider the spelling of difficult words. After students identify misspelled words from their writing, they meet in small groups to analyze those words and to discuss strategies useful when spelling unfamiliar words. Links to additional resources, including professional articles, are provided. (author/ncl)

Spell Check: Appraising the Value of Good Spelling

In this lesson, students examine scenarios in which misspelling words may have unfortunate results. Accurate spelling has taken on new importance in the Internet age. Working in teams, students investigate why misspellings can sometimes lead to mishaps on eBay and in other situations. They create and present skits to illustrate the pitfalls of poor spelling. Although this lesson does not focus on specific spelling strategies, it provides an engaging way to help students understand the importance of conventional spelling. (author/ncl)

Word Savvy [excerpt]: Introduction: Word-Savvy Thinking

A teacher from Dublin, Ohio, Max Brand understands the frustration and ineffective nature of assigning weekly spelling lists that students memorize for the test only to misspell later in their daily writing. His book, culled from both research and his classroom experience, focuses on integrating word learning into literacy workshops in ways that are at once practical, effective, and fun for both students and teachers.

Using spelling investigations, word study notebooks, reading logs, and writers' notebooks, students learn to savor new words, puzzle over confusing pronunciations, and test new spelling strategies. Brand, too, moves beyond the concept of the word wall by using the walls in his classroom as a collective writer's notebook where students choose and illustrate words, phrases, and sentences from books to create colorful, ever-changing displays throughout the room.

Thirty-plus sample lessons in Word Savvy detail everything from teaching vocabulary in content areas to developing anchor charts for word learning throughout the year. Teachers will be able to create a reflective classroom environment where language development is at the heart of learning. Discussions, reading, and writing are opportunities for explicit instruction of word concepts, helping students become responsible for their learning as they use these concepts in revising, editing, and inferring the meaning of new words they encounter. (author/bcbrown)

Carol Brown Dodson is the outreach specialist for the Ohio Resource Center. Dodson was an English language arts consultant for the Ohio Department of Education and is past president of OCTELA (Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts). Dodson, formerly a high school English teacher, department chair, and supervisor of English language arts in Columbus Public Schools, serves on the Ohio Graduation Test Reading Content Committee.

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