The class is halfway through their literacy lesson and Aran’s palms are sweating. He knows it is only a matter of time before he gets called on to spell one of the words from this week’s spelling list out loud. The very thought makes him feel a sense of rising panic.

Aran is not alone in feeling this way. Anxiety around spelling is a common problem for young people - and an issue that some schools are unwittingly perpetuating, says former primary school teacher Jane Considine.

Now a researcher and education consultant, Considine’s mission is to transform the teaching of spelling. She wants schools to move as far as possible away from the approach of sending home lists of words to be learned. It’s a method that she believes is outdated and unnecessarily stressful for pupils and parents, and one that, crucially, is not yielding results.

The teaching of spelling has been “garbled, vague and confusing” for decades, she argues, and the impact of that lack of clarity is writ large in the results: in the 2017 Sats, for example, only 13 per cent of Year 6 students were able to spell “coarse” correctly.

Considine and her colleagues also conducted an analysis of the 2019 key stage 2 Sats data from 10 primary schools across England and found that, although 76 per cent of students had achieved the expected standard, 57 per cent of them underperformed in the spelling test, achieving below-average scores.

“It’s an alarming picture,” Considine says. “Everyone is finding spelling a struggle; children and teachers. And the main reason it’s a struggle is because we’ve got time-poor teachers. Spelling needs time.”

Instead, she says, we have a rushed system, where the problem is “pushed out into the community” for parents to deal with, which can increase anxiety for young people and exacerbate inequalities.

‘Carve out classroom time’

School staff are well aware of this issue: as part of her research, Considine surveyed 1,362 teachers on the subject, and 76 per cent of them said that the method of sending a list of words home for a weekly test is an ineffective way to teach spelling. Considine clarifies that she is not against the idea of testing but says a different approach is urgently needed.

“We need progress checks, we need to know what children can do,” she says. “It’s not that tests are a bad thing, it’s this approach that puts the pressure out into the community. We need to do something different, where teachers carve out time for spelling and use it in an energised, effective way.”

And what this would mean for young people, she continues, is to move from “a place of anxiety to confidence” and, fundamentally, shift the engagement with words from a list-based task that can feel like a chore to a feeling that words are “prized and precious possessions”.

One of the methods Considine recommends is printing a tricky word, such as “thunderous” on to a T-shirt that a teacher can wear around the school. This might sound like a bit of a gimmick, but the idea is to demonstrate to children that spelling is valued and enjoyable.

In her recent book, The Spelling Book: transforming the teaching of spelling, Considine lays out a year-long research-based programme for teaching spelling to Year 2 students, with a focus on approaches that will reduce anxiety and promote enjoyment.

As well as the spelling T-shirt mentioned above, her methods include handing out “loud and proud” spelling badges for being able to recall complex words, and creating “spelling teams”, where points are pooled collectively.

“Enjoyment is hard to measure but we know it has such a positive effect,” Considine says. “If we can get children enjoying words, that’s half the battle. And we want to get to the point where we’re all enjoying it, not just the children but the teachers, too - making it bright and lively in our classrooms.”

Moving away from spelling anxiety means changing the relationship that students have with words, she continues, so rather than being intimidated or overwhelmed by them, they can feel like “word detectives”, out to spot the patterns of language.

“We want them to be pattern-finders,” she says. “It starts with phonemes but it’s also about prefixes and suffixes, and root words and origins - the brain is an incredible pattern-finding machine.

“Our job is to open children’s thinking so they can make these connections. I want children to be able to move from a place of hearing ‘that word’s right, that word’s wrong’, and instead looking at which part of a word is the tricky bit.”

She points out that most spelling is logical, with 96 per cent of English spelling being “predictable, logical and rule-based”. Where young people often get confused and stressed, she says, is with those tricky bits.

“So let’s focus on those bits,” Considine continues. “Things like double consonants: that’s a tricky bit. Or double double consonants, like in ‘millennium’. It’s about showing children that there’s a pattern, even in the tricky bits. Consonants are actually quite stable but they can trip us up when they’re double.”

And vowels? “They’re very volatile, they can be a nightmare, so let’s have those conversations.”

Considine’s book offers approaches that can help nurture such conversations, including spelling mentors (the best Year 5 and 6 spellers, who run lunchtime clubs to help younger pupils with their spelling problems and give them tips on how to improve), spelling hunts (where pupils solve clues by spelling words accurately) and spelling journals (where children can record word lists, try out different strategies and record their thinking for future reference).

She also recommends having a “focus five”: a laminated list of five key spellings to work on, personal to each student and attached to their desk. When a word is correctly used in independent writing, it is removed from the focus list.

‘Explosion of knowledge’

But Considine’s methods represent just one of many evidence-informed approaches that teachers now have access to when it comes to teaching spelling. US literacy expert Richard Gentry is author of a book called Brain Words: how the science of reading informs teaching, and he says that there has been an “explosion of knowledge” in the past two decades in terms of understanding what happens in the brain when we spell. This should have “huge implications for what we are doing in the classroom”, he says.

He explains that there is a growing knowledge about the circuitry in the brain and how it stores familiar words, forming a kind of mental dictionary. He proposes a system where spelling is used to teach reading skills, rather than the reverse, as is currently common.

“For a long time, people thought spelling was for writing but, in the past two decades of research and cognitive psychology and neural imaging, we’ve found that spelling is at the very core of the reading brain,” he says. “We know now that when we read, we actually use the spellings in our brain to connect with our spoken language system.”

Gentry describes spelling as “food for the brain”, adding that “a lack of effective spelling instruction starves the reading brain”. So he recommends explicit teaching of spelling for 15 minutes per day, using techniques such as “elaborative interrogation” (where students ask “why?” questions to help secure knowledge of words) and self-explanation (where students draw links and find patterns between words).

“Coming from the scientific community, it seems that teacher education programmes aren’t paying attention to the latest research in cognitive psychology and neuroimaging,” he says. “So they’re teaching with old methods that have been debunked by science - and that needs to change.”

Such changes will take a shift in mindset in schools, Considine agrees, but these are developments that are overdue.

“It’s recognising that spelling has had a poor look-in for a long time. We need something now that’s bright and beautiful, and sets the tone of everyone loving words.”

Zofia Niemtus is interim deputy commissioning editor for Tes

This article originally appeared in the 23 July 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Spelling anxiety”