You would have to look far and wide to find someone who doesn’t believe that phonics is an effective way to teach a child to read - it’s one of the most research-backed facts in education, and every school now uses phonics in their early years foundation stage provision and beyond.

However, it is much easier to find those in education who think phonics has a less-than-positive impact on learning to spell - in fact, a quick search on social media uncovers various arguments about how phonics leads to confusion when children come across words not spelled phonetically.

But is that really the fault of phonics? Or does phonics actually have a more positive influence on spelling?

Rebecca Treiman, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St Louis, says a number of studies have examined spelling in children who have received phonics instruction as a part of literacy instruction, as compared with children who have not.

“The results show that the inclusion of phonics benefits spelling for both typically developing children and children who are poor readers or spellers,” says Treiman, who also holds the title Burke and Elizabeth High Baker professor of child development in arts and sciences at the US institution.

“There hasn’t been as much research done on spelling as on reading but the results are pretty clear: phonics benefits spelling, as it benefits reading.”

Treiman’s own research includes a study in which she and colleagues compared the spelling skills of Grade 3 children (aged 8 and 9) who had received systematic phonics instruction, and children who had been in classrooms that had adhered to a strict “whole-language” approach since the beginning of their school careers.

What she found was that the pupils who had been taught phonics weren’t just comparable at spelling with their whole-language taught peers: they were, in fact, better.

“They were better not only at spelling real words but also at spelling novel items - that is, when they were asked to try to write a made-up word that they hadn’t heard before, the phonics-taught children were better able to come up with a spelling that, when pronounced, would sound like the made-up word that they were asked to write,” she says.

The ability to come up with readable spellings of new items is important, Treiman explains, because children often have to spell words they haven’t seen spelled before. “It’s beneficial to be able to produce plausible spellings,” she says.

However, this does not mean that phonics - and being able to read because of phonics - is necessarily “enough” for teaching spelling. “One issue is this long-standing belief that children will learn to spell as a result of reading,” Treiman told Tes in 2018.

“That has really worked against the teaching of spelling. The fact is, we don’t necessarily become good spellers by reading.”

So, what else do we need?

Julia Carroll is a reader in child development and education at Coventry University, and one of the world’s leading authorities on phonics. In a Tes Podagogy podcast last year, she explained that people often talk about phonetically regular words and phonetically irregular words - or “tricky” words, as they are known in some schools.

“There is a belief that there are some words you can sound out [to spell them] and some that can’t be,” she explains.

However, she says this isn’t strictly true. “There are few words that are completely irregular,” she says. “Normally, they have some letter sounds that are correct, so you can sound out some of them.”

As such, phonics will always provide the foundation for good spelling but there will need to be other techniques layered on top of it, she says.

“For example, ‘mist’ can be spelled ‘missed’, if past tense, and ‘mist’, if it is a weather description. So, once you have taught sound structure, you need to teach them the other kinds of structures - the meaning structures, the grammatical structures and so on.”

A mistake some make, she says, is viewing these techniques as a replacement for phonics. “The other spelling techniques should not be seen that way but as a next step - you are adding to phonics and expanding on it by showing how the system goes beyond phonics.”

There are lots of ways to do this, she explains, such as separating words into morphemes (the smallest units of meaning in a word) and exploring them. “Happy”, for example, is a single morpheme, while “unhappy” has the two morphemes: “un-” and “happy”. The prefix “un-” alters the meaning of happy, which students could then use to understand the words “unfriendly”, “unusually” and “unaware”.

Likewise, Carroll continues, there is a wealth of potential in exploring phonology (the sounds in words) by looking at elements like stressed and unstressed syllables - for example, the pattern of the first-syllable stress when verbs are used as nouns, as seen when the verb “to refund” becomes the noun “refund”.

And she advocates integrating spelling work into other parts of the curriculum rather than teaching it in isolation. Practising 10 words intensely for a week and then abandoning them is unlikely to lodge them in long-term memory, she says, whereas learning words in a meaningful context and revisiting them regularly is far more effective.

Treiman agrees that getting this balance between phonics and other techniques is crucial to create good spellers. So, how might that balance look in practice?

She says adapting phonics instruction, rather than replacing it, should be the way forward. As an example, she explains that phonics teaches that the “oi” sound may be spelled with either “oi” or “oy”.

“A phonics programme may not teach children when to use each option,” Treiman explains. “But there are some regularities here: ‘oi’ is most often used within a word, and ‘oy’ is more often used at the end - for example, ‘boil’ and ‘boy’. Children could benefit from explicit teaching about when to use each option.”

She adds that spelling can also connect to meaning - and an over-reliance on phonics might neglect this aspect of written English.

“For example, the ‘us’ sequence at the end of an adjective is typically spelled with ‘ous’, as in ‘jealous’ and ‘vicious’,” Treiman explains. “In words that are not adjectives, the same sound sequence is usually spelled in other ways. Children could benefit from learning about regularities pertaining to parts of speech and morphology but this is not often covered in phonics instruction.”

There is little evidence, then, that phonics derails attempts to spell in older primary age groups. However, clearly there are fundamental steps around how phonics is built upon that need to be taken to ensure children can spell effectively.

Chris Parr is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 29 January 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on... Phonics for spelling”