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Industry: Email Alert RSS FeedThe Strategic Spelling Skills of Students with Learning Disabilities: The Results of Two Studies
Journal of Instructional Psychology, March, 2000 by Craig Darch, Soobang Kim, Susan Johnson, Hollis James
There are few studies that investigated the effectiveness of strategy instruction to teach application of spelling rules. Bailet and Lyon (1985) have reported that a 37-year-old adult with a learning disability displayed initial deficits in suffix rule usage (e.g., -ing, -ion, -al, -ily), and significant improvement after task structure was modified to provide an implicit cue to the critical morphological spelling principle. This showed that increased structure may enabled a speller with learning disability to demonstrate rule knowledge that was not readily apparent in performance on a less structured word list. Darch and Simpson (1990) compared rule-based strategy and visual imagery mnemonic method for teaching spelling to elementary students with learning disabilities. Results of the study indicated that students with learning disabilities who received instruction based on a rule-based strategy approach displayed significant spelling achievement gains when compared to visual imagery method.
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The purpose of this paper is to report the results of two studies which focused on the use of spelling strategy by students with learning disabilities and the relative effectiveness of two, very different approaches for teaching spelling. Specifically, two research questions guided this study. First, we investigated the use of spelling strategies by elementary students with learning disabilities. We did this with the use of qualitative research methods by conducting intensive interviews with four students with learning disabilities. We felt that this research methodology would not only provide a picture of the type of spelling strategies used by these students but also, would provide insight as to why these students approached spelling as they did. Our second question was to determine effective spelling instructional approaches by comparing two highly dissimilar commercial spelling programs to see if one approach was superior. One method, rule-based strategy instruction, focused on teaching students spelling rules in which they utilized phonemic and morphemic strategies to spell words. The other method, traditional instruction, provided an array of spelling activities (e.g., introducing the words in the context of story, defining the meaning of the words, sentence writing, and dictionary skill training) to teach spelling words.
Our approaches (e.g., qualitative and quantitative study) are supported by Borg, Gall, & Gall (1993) who stated "many educational phenomena are best studied through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research designs. Qualitative research is best suited for initial investigation of a problem. Qualitative studies can produce thick description of an interesting phenomenon, discover relevant variables, and generate hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships between them. Quantitative research then can make rigorous measurements of these variable and test for the presence of the hypothesized relationships" (pg. 202).
Experiment 1: The Strategic Spelling Skills of Students with Learning Disabilities
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