How reading and spelling work

Those of us who are skilled readers and spellers often aren’t aware of the amazing set of mental processes undergirding our literacy. Spoken language has been part of human experience for tens of thousands of years, but reading and writing are a relatively recent invention. In order to read a new word, you have to:

• recognize the letters that make it up;

• parse them correctly and put them in the right order (e.g. sh-i-p, not s-h-i-p or h-i-p-s);

• convert those letters into sounds;

• blend the sounds together into a word;

• use your oral language skills to understand the word (and keep track of that meaning across a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, and so on).

Spelling works in the opposite direction — breaking words into sounds, then representing those sounds with letters. In English, this is often more difficult than reading, because you have to remember if it’s berd, bird, or burd and know whether you should write meat or meet.

Skilled readers and spellers recognize and write most words by sight: these complex activities have become effortless, automatic. But when someone has reading difficulties (dyslexia) or writing difficulties (dysgraphia), the complexity of the operation becomes painfully clear. There are different types of dyslexia and dysgraphia, because problems can arise at any point of the process (and often more than one).

So when someone has difficulty with reading or spelling, we need to do a thorough assessment: which parts of the process are causing the problem? Once we know that, we can specifically address individual needs.

To find out more about the current state of research into how children learn to read, see the paper by Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle, and Kate Nation: ‘Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert’. It’s long, but it’s very clearly written, with references throughout to up-to-date studies.