are the findings that Wade-Woolley and Siegel obtained when they studied
children for whom English was a second language. Although the second
language speakers performed more poorly than the native speakers on
tests of syntactic knowledge, phoneme deletion, and pseudoword
repetition, the second language speakers were not worse than the native
speakers in spelling. These results suggest that, even if children have
not fully mastered the sound system of their second language, they need
not be disadvantaged in spelling it. The findings appear to pose a
challenge to views of reading and spelling that place primary emphasis
on phonology. The Muter and Snowling study, together with the Nunes,
Bryant and Bindman study, broadens the focus by examining aspects of
spelling beyond phonology. Muter and Snow ling, in their longitudinal
study of British school- children, examined the degree to which various
linguistic skills measured between the ages of 4 and 6 predicted
spelling ability at age 9. The results support the idea that
phonological skill plays an important role in spelling development, and
further suggest that awareness of phonemes is more strongly related to
spelling ability than awareness of rimes. In addition, grammatical
awareness appears to predict spelling skill. Children who are able to
reflect on meaning relationships among words may be in a position to
understand how this information is represented in English spelling.
