Learning spelling through reading/writing: How many occurrences are needed to foster acquisition?
A consensus has emerged in the scholarly literature on the importance of decoding in the acquisition of spelling knowledge. Indeed, the hypothesis of self-learning through reading posits that proper decoding helps with memorizing orthographic forms. Other studies have measured the impact of visual processing and graphomotor ability in learning lexical spelling. In the case of either of these two factors, the number of occurrences required is not unanimously agreed upon. The goal of our study is to measure the effects of 10 reading/writing exercises on second to fifth graders’ learning of lexical spelling. The results reveal that, starting from the fifth reading/writing exercise, the benefits of each additional exercise remain stable.