English orthography is referred to as ‘polyphonic and polygraphic’ by Arab-Moghaddam and Senechal (2001) thus making it a difficult language in which to learn to read and spell. Comber (1985:73) informs that ‘there are 300 different ways in which the 26 letters of the alphabet are collectively related to the sounds of spoken English……. vowels share 79 of these 300 spelling rules.’ The question is how children learn to spell in English given the perceived difficulty with its orthography? There are two aspects to the spelling process, spelling aloud and writing the word down (see Treiman and Bourassa, 2000) and for both, children need the ability to segment the different phonemes within a word and match to a grapheme/s. Research indicates that there are various phases or stages in learning to spell. Children progress in spelling from the ‘precommunicative stage’ (Gentry, 1982; Ministry of Education for New Zealand, 1985) when there is no relationship between the phonemes and associated graphemes to the ‘transitional’ stage (Education Department of Western Australia, 1994) when specific strategies are used. It can be argued that an essential element in being able to spell is having the phonological knowledge and understanding to segment words into phonemes and match these with corresponding graphemes. According to Rose (2006) children in the early years of schooling have to be taught this in a systematic manner. The Linguistic Phonics Approach (LPA) (BELB, 2004) has been introduced as an innovative programme in Northern Ireland with the aim of providing a systematic programme in phonics. This paper examines if there are differences in the spelling ability of children taught in schools using the Linguistic Phonics Approach (LPA) and those taught in schools using other approaches. In particular it compares the performance of pupils of differing abilities in both sets of schools.

The sampling frame comprised 54 primary pupils of differing abilities from schools which use Linguistic Phonics and those which use other approaches (see Gray et al., 2006; 2007). To assess pupils’ writing skills over time, samples of writing were collected at the beginning, middle and end of a school year. The assessment tool used for analyzing the children’s spelling was adapted from the Indicators for Writing Developmental Continuum (Education Department of Western Australia, 1994).

Findings indicate that there were differences in correct spelling between those pupils who experienced the LPA and those who did not. This was apparent in the ability to spell more complex words correctly by the higher and lower ability LPA children. Many of the LPA middle ability children did better than their nLPA peers when it came to taking a risk in spelling their own words, a technique which was used also by both higher ability groups. Additionally, both higher and middle ability LPA groups showed more progress in the spelling of 3 syllable words. It was noted that some of the lower ability LPA pupils had an understanding of word families and could use simple morphemes. However, there were several pupils in the lower (nLPA) and middle ability groups (LPA) who made slow progress throughout the year. The spelling of some of these children did not go beyond letter strings often interspersed with vcc and cvc words.