Spelling is taught in school during the early years, but past 6th grade, most likely the students are left on their own to hone their spelling skills.
Sadly, people with poor spelling aptitude are often looked down on and seen as having little intelligence or education. This dilemma is a parent's bane, especially if the child has little or no interest in reading.
There is no substitute for habitual reading in order to build one's vocabulary and consequently improve spelling skills. Just as we develop oral proficiency by listening to fluent speakers talk, we enhance our written language – spelling included – by reading what others write.
The conventional method of teaching spelling is via the visual-memory based method of giving lists of irrelevant words to children, the spellings of which they then have to memorize, as learning to spell is considered to be 'a matter of storing sequences of letters in their correct order in visual memory.' (Griva & Anastasiou, 2009).
However, once spelling instruction at school stops, the need to build vocabulary doesn't – and the child most certainly won't have the motivation to learn spelling by himself or herself with the use of such uninteresting word lists.
Thus, parents should take it upon themselves to fire up that desire to improve spelling with instruction that is systematic and interesting.
Have a handy dictionary at home where your child can look up every new word encountered. The child should first be trained in the use of a dictionary, and it's especially important to introduce similar-sounding phonemes that may make dictionary searches difficult.
When teaching spelling words, it's better to introduce new ones within a context – that is, if a word is encountered on the news or heard on a TV show. When the child looks up the spelling of a word in the dictionary, have him or her put a mark next to it. If it has been looked up more than once, it can then be added to a personal list of spelling words.
Apart from the lookup, encourage your child to write that word, correctly spelled, several times to build motor memory.
It's also beneficial to immediately use the new word in a sentence, and software such as the ubiquitous Ultimate Spelling software can be extremely helpful.
Unlike online dictionaries that provide only one or a couple of usage examples, the Ultimate Spelling software, which is downloadable and can be used even when you're not connected to the Internet, gives the user up to 6 usage examples, including images and word maps.
Templeton (1983) suggests that a spelling/meaning connection – that is, actively exploring the interrelationships of a word's spelling and meaning across prefixes, suffixes, base words, and root words are crucial for spelling retention.
The computer spelling program you choose must then be able to provide as much information as possible on a word's correct usage and application to facilitate its real-world use by the user.
Making use of software is invaluable for teaching spelling at home in that a parent needs only to be a guide and does not have to look over the child's shoulder the entire time.
If the spelling software is user-friendly and interesting enough, the child will learn to use the tool on his or her own each time a new spelling word is encountered.
References:
Griva, E & Anastasiou, D 2009, 'Morphological strategies training: The effectiveness and feasibility of morphological strategies training for students of English as a foreign language with and without spelling difficulties', Journal of Writing Research, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 199-223.
Templeton, S 1983, 'Using the spelling/meaning connection to develop word knowledge in older students', Journal of Reading, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 8-14.