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Educational Research
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Word familiarity and spelling difficulty

a
Patrick Groff
a
College of Education , San Diego State University , San Diego, CA 92182‐0138, USA
Published online: 09 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Patrick Groff (1984) Word familiarity and spelling difficulty, Educational Research, 26:1, 33-35, DOI:
10.1080/0013188840260106

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 Educational Research Volume 26 Number 1 February 1984
Word familiarity and
spelling difficulty
Patrick Groff, College of Education, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182-0138, USA
Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 04:13 23 January 2015
Summary
Experts in spelling instruction commonly have
expressed the belief that children's familiarity
with words and their ability to spell them are
closely related. The findings of two studies of
this relationship, presented to follow, question
this assumption. Correlations obtained between
children's familiarity with words and their
abilities to spell them were found to be too low
to have any value for predictive purposes. These
findings suggest that learning to read and learning
to spell are significantly different, and that
systematic instruction in spelling therefore must
attend to factors other than word familiarity.
It has long been held that children's
familiarity with the meaning of words should be
a major factor in the decisions made as to which
words to assign to the various grade levels of
elementary school spelling programmes.
Comments by spelling experts that children's
familiarity with the meaning of words is an
important criterion for their grade-level place-
ment can be identified readily.
Previous comments
To this effect, authorities in spelling
instruction have implied that if a word appears
frequently in written or spoken language, that
is, if it is familiar to children, it should be taught
early in the course of a child's learning to spell.
For example, Cahen, Craun and Johnson (1971,
p. 287) contend 'that word frequency can be
associated with spelling difficulty*. Smith (1973,
p. 127) believes 'that we spell familiar words
(even when irregularly spelled) better than
unfamiliar but regularly spelled words'. Today's
teachers are advised that the first step in the
establishment of a superior spelling programme
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH is the termly journal of the NFER
33
'is to place children properly in a word list,
beginning with the words most frequently used
in writing' (Hillerich, 1982, p. 144). It has even
been claimed that the commonality of use of
words and the difficulty of their spelling are
highly correlated in a statistical sense. This
speculation on Hildreth's (1955) part lacked
any basis in the empirical evidence at the time
it was made, however. It is notable, nonetheless,
that the content of many series of spelling text-
books in the past were based on the acceptance
of the assumption that children's familiarity
with words is a critical factor in their grade
placement in spelling programmes (Hanna,
Hodges and Hanna, 1971).
Challenges to the assumption
There have been only a few studies made of
the assumption that the frequency of the
occurrence of words, or children's familiarity
with the meaning of words, are closely related
to the difficulty children have in spelling them.
The evidence from these studies tends more
to challenge this belief than to support it. An
example of this lack of support is the finding
that about 75 per'cent of the most persistently
misspelled words are among the 1000 words
that appear most frequently in print (Horn,
1969). The investigation by Breed (1930)
questions in another way the supposedly close
relationship that exists between word familiarity
and spelling success with children. Breed placed
the most frequently occurring words at grade
levels three through six according to their
spelling difficulties. The least difficult to spell
words were assigned to grade three, and so on.
Breed found that only about 25 per cent of the
words so assigned actually were used by children
in their writings at the given grade levels. Breed's
data thus revealed that children's spelling needs
cannot be predicted successfully by a resort to
 34 Educational Research Volume 26 Number 1 February 1984
an index of word familiarity and spelling
difficulty.
More recently, Groff (1982) studied the
assumption that words that appear in writing
with low frequency are more difficult for
children to spell than are those that appear with
relatively high frequency. Groff obtained
coefficients of correlation (r's) between the
difficulties children have in spelling words and
the relative frequency of occurrence of these
words. The median r obtained in this study was
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.43. Groff noted that the calculation r 2 indicates
that there are only about 18 per cent common
factors to be found between the two variables
that the r = .43 represents. Bloomer (1961)
earlier had found a similarly low r between the
conect spelling of children and the frequency of
occurrence of the words they attempted to spell.
The findings of Groff and of Bloomer thus do
not lend support to the claim that the frequency
of a word's occurrence is a critical criterion in
the decision as to when children should be taught
to spell it.
Groff s (1982) study was a replication of an
investigation by Beers, Beers and Grant (1977).
A finding of this 1977 study was that words
that occur with relative low frequency are
significantly more difficult to spell than words
which occur with higher frequency. This finding
was criticized negatively by Groff. He pointed
to the contrast between the spelling scores of the
pupils in this study with those reported in the
New Iowa Spelling Scale (Greene, 1955). The
fact the Beers, Beers and Grant study involved
only ten words (the NISS tested over 5000)
was said to affect adversely the validity of this
investigation.
The present studies
The purpose of the two studies to be
described as follows was to investigate more
directly than had previously been done the
relationship of children's familiarity with the
meaning of written words and their abilities to
spell them. For the purposes of the present two
studies two sets of previously available data were
utilized.
The first of these data came from Dale and
Eichholz (1960) and from Greene (1955). Dale
and Eichholz had fourth-grade pupils in selected
schools throughout the US respond to multiple-
choice reading tests of vocabulary. Their scores
on these word tests were said to indicate these
children's familiarity with the words in question.
Greene tested the ability of children in class-
rooms across this country to spell the 5507
most frequently occurring words. He reported
the findings of these testings in the New Iowa
Spelling Scale.
The New Iowa Spelling Scale reports the
spelling test scores of fourth-grade children
for 381 of the 1302 words that were used with
the fourth-grade pupils in the Dale and Eichholz
study. This common group of 381 words
provided the opportunity for a statistical
examination of the relationship between fourth-
grade children's familiarity with words and the
difficulty that children in this grade level had in
spelling these words. To this effect a Pearson
product moment coefficient of correlation was
obtained between fourth-grade children's word
familiarity scores for these 381 words and their
spelling scores on these same words. This r was
.20.
In a second study of the relationship between
children's familiarity with words and the
difficulty that they had spelling these words the
data presented by Brittain and Fitzgerald (1942)
were used. These authors reported the frequency
of use of 810 words in the themes written by
second-grade children. Also given in this report
were the frequencies of spelling errors by these
pupils of these 810 words.
A Pearson product moment coefficient of
correlation also was obtained between the
frequency of children's use of these 810 words
and the frequency of their spelling errors with
them. This r was .49.
Discussion
The magnitude of the r's obtained in the
present study, .20 and .49, suggests that there
is a degree of relationship between children's
familiarity with the meanings of printed words
and their ability to spell them correctly. These
findings also imply, however, that the degree of
children's familiarity with written words would
not be of great usefulness in predicting whether
or not they will be able to spell such words
accurately or how difficult it would be for
children to learn to spell such words. Dale and
Eichholz (1960) believed that the findings of
their study of children's familiarity with written
words could serve this function. They claim that
their study 'helps provide lists of spelling words
whose meanings are already familiar to the
 Word familiarity and spelling difficulty
student' (p. 2). Implicit in this statement, of
course, is the assumption that words that are
relatively familiar to children will be easier for
them to spell than words less well understood.
The correlation obtained in the present study
with the Dale-Eichholz data, r = .20, offers little
support for this belief, however.
The larger r obtained in the present study
with data from second-grade children as versus
fourth-grade children does suggest, nonetheless,
that children's spelling abilities in the second
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grade may be more affected by their familiarity
with words than is the case in the fourth grade.
This may be a negative effect, however. Grade
two children's familiarity with words, their use
of them in themes, correlated r = .49 with their
spelling errors. This r was higher than the median
r (.39) obtained by Groff (1982) between second
grade pupils' spelling ability and the frequency
of occurrence of words.
The present studies, and the evidence from
previous relevant studies directs one to certain
conclusions about the relationship in question.
It is prudent for teachers to question the assump-
tion that children's familiarity with written
words is closely related to their ability to spell
these words correctly. This evidence suggests,
accordingly, that the advice given teachers that
instruction with frequently used words is the
critical prerequisite of a successful spelling
programme, at any grade level (Hillerich, 1982),
is not acceptable. The evidence also implies that
teachers are not wise to assume that children
who have learned to read a word correctly and to
understand its meaning will as a result also learn
to spell it. The findings of the present studies
and the related evidence thus do not support
plans for spelling instruction wherein teachers
expect children to learn to spell largely as a
consequence of their learning to read. To the
contrary, these findings suggest that learning to
spell correctly is a task significantly different
from learning to read and understand written
words.
The evidence presented in this discussion
therefore appears to uphold the idea that a
systematic programme of spelling instruction,
one that deals with spelling skill development
in an intensive, direct and specific manner, is
a reasonable necessity for the elementary school
language arts curriculum. The argument has
been made that 'a word which is needed
frequently by children for example in the third
35
grade should be presented at that level notwith-
standing its difficulty' (Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald,
1965, p. 303). The empirical evidence dictates,
however, that it is wiser for teachers to keep
in mind the factors closely identified with
spelling difficulty when they make decisions
as to the grade placement of spelling words.
For example, the degree to which a word
conforms to the rules of grapheme-phoneme
correspondence is likely to have more influence
on a child's success in learning to spell it than is
the degree to which the child understands its
meaning (Cronnell, 1971).
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BREED, F.S. (1930). How to Teach Spelling. Dansville,
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BRITTAIN, F J . and FITZGERALD, J.A. (1942). The
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