Spelling begins with phonemic awareness. This set of skills allow us to hear whole words, separate them into sequential sounds and blend the sounds back together. The skills include rhyming, syllabication and identifying similar and different onset and rime patterns. They include the ability to discriminate between similar sounds such as the /f/ and /v/ sounds, or short /e/ and short /i/. Practice these skills by counting the sounds heard in words, saying words one sound at a time, listening to isolated sounds and blending them into words, playing rhyming games and dividing spoken words into syllables. Be sure your pronunciation of words is correct--avoid errors such as "flustrated" for "frustrated."
Spelling relies on correspondence between sounds and clusters of letters. Adults who are striving to improve spelling will need to assess their knowledge of sounds and their associated letter patterns. There are 44 commonly acknowledged sounds, and many can be formed by more than one pattern, such as the long /a/ sound spelled by the letters "ai," "ay" and "eigh." Word sorts are a good tool to practice spelling patterns. These activities involve choosing a sound, such as /sh/, finding examples and sorting them by spelling pattern. For a /sh/ sort, a student might start with the words "bush," "sugar," "shade" and "action." Words with the "sh" pattern are grouped together, as are words with the "su" pattern and the "ti" pattern. The task is to find more words to put with each group and locate other related spelling patterns.
Phonetic spelling is governed by predictable rules. Rules encompass topics such as dividing words into syllables, adding affixes and modifying roots. Spelling students can study by making lists of generalities they notice in reading and finding words that fit the rules. A student might notice that "come" changes to "coming" and "race" becomes "racing." The applicable rule is to drop final silent "e" before adding suffixes beginning with a vowel.
Once people learn the basic rules, most find they have a handful of words that consistently cause them difficulty. Keep a spelling journal, listing troublesome words. Spelling is primarily a visual memory skill, so the standard practices of visually studying the word, copying it several times, then covering the example and writing it correctly are effective learning techniques for most people. Learners may try memorizing one syllable at a time, looking for smaller words or familiar patterns within the larger whole, intentionally mispronouncing the word to emphasize tricky spelling or writing the word in cursive script.