Spelling does appear to go through the same stages as reading. Furthermore, the issues and controversies that have been raised in trying to understand reading have also been raised in spelling. In the previous chapter, we discussed the different stages of reading, particularly the stages from magical to orthographic as suggested by Uta Frith. The first two stages, the magical and the logographic (picture) stage, are illustrated by writing. For example, the child does not know the relationship between letters and their sounds and, when asked to write a word, just engages in scribbling and passes it off as writing.
The other example Frith gives in the model relating to writing is a logographic one. The child can write dog but cannot analyze the phonology of the letters or the letter sequence. If the same word is typed in a different font than the child’s handwriting, the child refuses to recognize that this is the same word. The typed word dog does not contain the same features as the child’s handwritten dog. Not only is the word being read as a picture, but the details of the “handwritten” picture assume importance.
Think of a child who does not know how to write but is asked to say the spelling of a word (hat or mat or dog). Can he/she follow a logographic image? We think not. Saying the spelling of a word requires the child to say the letters one by one in the right sequence, as opposed to seeing a whole picture. So is it possible that children cannot have a logographic stage in spelling? Do we have a whole word spelling and a spelling based on phonological analysis of the word, just as in reading?
It is possible that the child remembers the word dog as a whole or as a gestalt pattern and then draws it, letter by letter, just as a picture is drawn? On the other hand, if the child is forced to write out the word letter by letter, he/she must say the name of the letters; then it becomes the same kind of activity as phonological coding.
In one sense though, children could be learning to spell whole words without doing phonological analysis. They cannot perform orthographic or morphological (word) groupings such as save or saved. Let us examine the orthographic features of the word bead compared to the word dead; children must remember that the two are orthographically similar in the middle part but are pronounced differently. If children cannot distinguish the different pronunciations of words which share common orthography, they really do not understand spelling. The challenge, especially in the English language, is to learn logographic features