How did Literably select words for its spelling assessments? Follow
Word Selection
Literably sourced the majority of spelling words from the English Lexicon Project. The selected words reflect the most frequent spelling-sound correspondences found in English (Fry, 2004). We used Carnegie Melon University’s Pronouncing Dictionary as a source to validate grapheme phoneme correspondences (GPCs). Words were purposefully chosen to be familiar, but not visually frequent, so students are assessed on encoding phonemes rather than knowing a word’s spellings by sight (Treiman, 1993). As an illustration, the image below highlights the difference between accessing a word's meaning by manipulating its phonemes sight versus by sight (Gillon, 2018).
Literably continually adds new words to its spelling word corpus each month. Words are selected to encourage the phonological route of processing words.
Please reach to support@literably.com if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions for our spelling corpus, or any of our content. We'd be excited to chat!
Works Cited
Fry, E. (2004). Phonics: A Large Phoneme - Grapheme Frequency Count Revised. Journal of
Literacy Research, 36(1), 85–98.
Gillon, G. T. (2018). Phonological Awareness. Guilford Publications.
Treiman, R. (1993). Beginning to Spell. Oxford University Press on Demand.