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Learning to spell is more difficult than learning to read and for most people, accurate spelling requires some knowledge of the spelling system that underpins written English – knowledge of the reasons whywords are written the way they are.

Rebecca Treiman (2011) says:
“However spelling is more difficult than reading. One reason is that, across languages, ambiguity tends to be greater in the sound-to-spelling direction than the spelling-to-sound direction. Another reason is that spellers must produce all of the elements of a word in the correct order, whereas readers can
sometimes  identify a word on the basis of a subset of its letters or on the basis of its context. People who depend quite heavily on partial cues for word recognition may be above-average readers but below-average spellers. Because good reading does not automatically ensure good spelling, teachers
cannot ignore spelling. Encouraging children to invent their own spellings is valuable early on, but children must learn that each word has a conventional written form. They must learn about the principles and patterns that motivate the spellings of their language. Although learners can induce
some patterns without explicit teaching, well-designed instruction can speed their learning. (pp.3,4)”

Ref:   Spelling. In P. C. Hogan (Ed.), Cambridge encyclopedia of the language sciences (pp. 799–800). New York: Cambridge University Press.

This means that teachers need to understand the phonological, orthographic and morphological properties of words and to know about the most reliable spelling rules and conventions that affect the spelling of English words.

Download the teacherknowledge assessment to find out what you know about the spelling system of written English.
Teacher Knowledge Assessment 2018

Download the answers to the teacher knowledge assessment
Teacher Knowledge Assessment answers 2018

The information in this assessment is covered in the teaching topics in the two teacher guides Switch on to Spelling and Spelling Under Scrutiny.

Download the ideas for upskilling teacher knowledge.
Teacher Knowledge Assessment practice ideas (2)