Spelling is a window into a student's individual language system and, therefore, canprovide clues into the student's understanding, use, and integration of underlyinglinguistic skills. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) should be involved in improvingstudents' literacy skills, including spelling, though frequently available measures ofspelling do not provide adequate information regarding critical underlying linguistic skillsthat contribute to spelling. This paper outlines a multilinguistic, integrated model of wordstudy (Masterson & Apel, 2007) that highlights the important influences of phonemicawareness, orthographic pattern awareness, semantic awareness, morphologicalawareness and mental graphemic representations on spelling. An SLP can analyze anindividual's misspellings to identify impairments in specific linguistic components andthen develop an individualized, appropriate intervention plan tailored to a child's uniquelinguistic profile, thus maximizing intervention success.
