What should every teacher know about orthographic knowledge? Why is it so important to effectively teach spelling? Here are nine key takeaways. 

You can read part 1 of this blog series here and part 2 here. 

The diagram below shows the elements that build up our linguistic knowledge, including orthographic knowledge. The more times this process is repeated, the more solidly our visual knowledge is built up. 

What is orthography? 

“The word orthography is derived from two Greek roots: orthos, meaning correct, and graphein, meaning to write. As such, orthography literally means correct writing.” Apel (2011, p. 592) 

“Alongside phonological knowledge, students must have orthographic knowledge, that is, understanding which letter sequences are both possible and plausible in English. Given that English does not have a consistent match between phonemes and graphemes, deciding which graphemes to use is an important part of orthographic knowledge. Orthographic knowledge also includes knowing the generalised graphemic conventions, for example consonants generally are not doubled after long vowel sounds.” Adoniou (2014, p. 146)  

You might look at a spelling and know that certain graphemes don’t go together, or that the grapheme wouldn’t be used in a certain place. For example, knowing that ‘igh’ doesn’t usually come at the beginning of a word, so ‘idea’ would never be spelled as ‘ighdea’. That is your orthographic knowledge.  

1. When talking about spelling, we should say ‘patterns’, not ‘rules’.

2. Learning should be embedded with phonics.  

Children will learn initial graphemes in phonics. For example, the two graphemes in the image below represent the sound /oi/.  

Depending on your SSP (systematic synthetic phonics) programme, one of these graphemes will be taught first and then the other one will be taught later in the programme. That said, knowing which graphemes represent a sound is not enough. We need to teach children when to use them so they can understand which is the most plausible.  

To do this, we can look at lots of different words that contain the graphemes ‘oi’ or ‘oy’ and try to generalise some patterns.  

Looking at the words, we can identify that the ‘oi’ grapheme generally appears at the beginning of a word, for example, ‘oil’ and ‘oink’ or in the middle of a word, for example, ‘boil’, ‘coil’ and ‘toil’. We can also identify that the ‘oy’ grapheme generally appears at the end of a word, for example, ‘annoy’, ‘enjoy’ and ‘boy’. Doing so is developing our orthographic knowledge.  

Some people believe that it is too much for children to learn too soon; however, if we do not explore this with the children, they are left to guess which grapheme to use every time, which can be really frustrating for children. It is almost like hiding the solution! Whereas, if they know the generalised pattern, it gives them a guide of which grapheme to use when. Obviously five- and six-year-olds might not remember this pattern straight away, it is something that we build up over time.  

It is important to remember that children are at the beginning of their learning journey and that they do not have the same text exposure as adults. As children have seen fewer words, they are less likely to have had a chance to see these patterns for themselves.  

3. Establish the patterns first before looking at exceptions. 

We want children to be able to see and recognise the patterns first, so we should show them words that follow the pattern before looking at words that are the exception. We can show children how many words follow the pattern in comparison to how many words are the exception.  

Phonics schemes often explore this through the concept of ‘best fit’ as used in Phonics Shed’s DfE validated scheme or a similar concept.  

This can help children answer: 

Which grapheme am I using where in a word? 
Which is the most common? 
Which is the best fit or most likely? 

4. It doesn’t stop at phonics.  

We need to continue to identify these patterns beyond phonics and in spelling lessons. For example, in Spelling Shed’s scheme, we look at how to add the suffix ‘-es’ to words ending in ‘y’. We can look at the pattern and then look at words that follow the pattern. We can look at exceptions to the spelling patterns when they come up.  

There are four main patterns for adding suffixes to words. They are: 

It’s important to do lots of exploration of when you do these but also when you do not. It’s also important to explore why you don’t, so we are constantly looking for patterns.  

5. There isn’t always a pattern 

The English language has had many influences, predominately being influenced by lots of different languages. Therefore, there isn’t always a pattern, so we need another way to highlight the letter sequence. Word sorts can help draw attention to the part of the word that needs your focus. 

To sort the words in the image below, we need to focus on the words and the part in the word that represents the ‘a’ sound with the unusual spelling pattern. This makes sure that we draw attention to the unusual spelling pattern.  

6. Draw attention to the unusual part of the spelling pattern. 

Research suggests that we should explicitly raise pupils’ awareness of irregular spelling patterns and teach flexible strategies for approaching them. We should be drawing attention to the part of the word with the unusual spelling pattern.  

7. Orthographic mapping is a cognitive process.  

“Orthographic mapping is the cognitive process by which readers associate speech sounds with written letters (phoneme-grapheme associations) in a written word to store it for immediate retrieval “on sight”.” Mather & Jaffe (2021, p. 15-16) 

According to The Measured Mom – Science of Reading, adults can read between 30,000 and 70,000 words with this on-sight retrieval. This isn’t by memorising the shape of the word, it is the association of speech sounds with written letters for immediate retrieval.  

Young children may need to decode words that older children and adults would be able to read instantly without the need for blending aloud or in their heads. This is because the words are familiar to older children and adults and they have had lots of exposure to them.  

8. Orthographic mapping is NOT learning by sight 

Orthographic mapping is not learning by rote memorisation and it is not learning words by sight. The more you are exposed to the words and go through the phonological processing, the more you will build up the bank of words in your head. 

9. Looking at syllables supports orthographic mapping 

Looking at syllables is an effective way of supporting orthographic mapping. As orthographic mapping is the association between speech sounds and written letters, activities that connect written words to their pronunciation will aid it. A syllable is a unit of pronunciation that contains a vowel, with or without adjoining consonants. Syllables give a connection with the speech sounds. It also breaks words into smaller chunks to aid the mapping process because you can make connections between other words with similar syllables. 

For the purposes of syllables, the letter ‘y’ is considered a vowel when it makes the sound of a (long or short) vowel, for example, when the ‘y’ represents the /i/ sound in the word ‘mystery’. The number of vowel sounds is equal to the number of syllables in a word. 

Different strategies to use for counting syllables include:

It is useful to do a variety of these with children.  

Remember that syllables are not an exact science. Like phoneme mapping, there is not always one correct answer. Syllabification is highly dependent on your pronunciation. You might identify the same number of syllables in a word as someone else, but where you place a syllable break may differ.  

In the example above, the word ‘feather’ has two variants of how you could break the word into syllables and the word ‘middle’ has three variants. However, the way ‘feather’ has been split in the words at the bottom would not be correct. 

Free Syllables and Syllabification Resource 

Download your FREE Syllables and Syllabification resource by clicking here.  

Video Webinar Recording: How to Teach Spelling Effectively – Part Three: Orthographic Knowledge 

Watch this free webinar recording for all of the above.  

Read How to Teach Spelling Effectively – Part Four here.

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