Metaphonological awareness and spelling ability

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between metaphonological awareness and spelling ability. Twenty-five children in Kindergarten and Grades One and Two were asked to participate in two tasks of metaphonological awareness, one involving phoneme segmentation (Yopp,1988) and the other phoneme deletion (Rosner,1975). Children were also asked to provide self-generated spelling samples. Spelling samples were then analyzed according to a spelling assessment scheme developed for this study and based on the developmental spelling stages outlined by Beers and Beers (1981) and Gentry (1982). The major finding from this study is that some aspects of metaphonological ability are reliably and moderately related to spelling development. Other findings regard the characteristics of children's spelling errors observed in the course of developing the spelling assessment scheme.Medicine, Faculty ofAudiology and Speech Sciences, School ofGraduat