Here’s an interesting presentation of coaching/learning spelling in English. The author uses the term ‘word mapping’ which is the same term used with the Reading Reflex Phono-Graphic Method that combines reading and writing/spelling from the very beginning.
The underlying concept for ‘word mapping’ is that words are composed of sounds (phonemes) and that we represent these sounds with particular symbols (letters and combinations of letters). The Reading Genie website presents a nice progression for analyzing a word and learning its spelling, in 9 steps, where one doesn’t look at the actual spelling until step 6. This approach really puts the emphasis on the sounds involved and then the code necessary to represent those sounds.
There are a number of aspects of the Reading Genie website’s information that I don’t appreciate, e.g. a focus on blending of syllables and developing discrete phoneme awareness last (which I’m not sure is necessary, despite its relative difficulty). But there are some very useful tools there as well, including Developing Fluency, and for parents/teachers, How to Count Phonemes in Words.
