Spelling is the process or activity of writing or naming the letters of a word. For students to develop spelling skills and implement strategies, teachers need to teach students appropriate strategies to accurately spell familiar and unfamiliar words when composing texts.

Students need to understand how to use banks of known words, word origins, base words, suffixes and prefixes, morphemes, spelling patterns and generalisations to learn and spell new words. The four forms of spelling knowledge include:

Students need to be taught spelling in an explicit, systematic, functional and contextual way. View and print examples of spelling instruction (pdf, 20KB)