How to individualize lexical spelling instruction with distributed retrieval and feedback: an exploratory study with first-grade French students

With three groups of first-grade French children, we tested different spelling teaching strategies, and notably the effectiveness of individualized teaching approach adapted to each child’s pace of learning and words already known, compared with traditional strategies identical for all children. An experimental group was offered individualized distributed relearning sessions with feedback. A traditional group learned words with the teacher’s usual approach: observing the word, copying it, revising it and writing it in a dictation at the end of the week. A control group received no explicit spelling instruction for the tested words. At the end of the experiment, the children in all groups had to write the words in an isolated task or included in sentences, or produce them spontaneously to describe a picture. The words varied in frequency, consistency, and length. Analyses of the rates of correctly spelled words using linear mixed models showed poorer performance in the control group than in the traditional or experimental groups. The experimental group performed better than the traditional group when spelling inconsistent or long words. The experimental group’s performance was relatively consistent whatever the task, including a written sentence production task. The initial results of this exploratory study are encouraging and should be extended to other school levels and other languages. The discussion focuses on the value of deploying such a strategy in the classroom to better adapt to the pace and initial spelling level of each child in French or in any language for which spelling is particularly opaque.