Spelling development: Fine-tuning strategy-use and capitalising on the connections between words

English spelling, as well as in many other languages, consists of three elements: morphology, etymology and phonology. Spelling instruction, however, focuses primarily on phonology and there is a dearth of intervention studies that examine the effect of explicitly teaching all three elements to children. We report two studies, which examined 5- to 11-year olds' spelling strategies and the effect of a spelling intervention. The intervention groups, in both studies, significantly outperformed control groups on all spelling measures. The benefits of teaching children about morphology and etymology are discussed.