Orthographic performance in Chilean students: Keys for teaching spelling

Abstract

In spite of being important for several aspects of writing, orthography has been scarcely discussed in current research. This article presents a comprehensive, current and representative picture of the orthographic performance of fourth-grade Chilean students, in order to use this data to inform teaching. A stratified sample taken from the representative sample of the national assessment SIMCE writing pilot of 2008 was analyzed. The results were later interpreted in terms of cognitive, communicative and didactics approaches. Among the main findings, a high percentage of correctly written words and a better performance in the genre of the formal letter stand out significantly over the genres short story and news report. In sum, it is suggested to focus instruction on the mistakes found, rather than teaching norms; and to embed this instruction within experiences of writing in communicative situations.