Update
Blog
Written by Lina Hajar, Learning Development Advisor at The Valens Clinic, Dubai.
Does anxiety cause difficulty in spelling or spelling tasks provoke anxiety?
Understanding the Relationship:
There is a close connection between spelling and anxiety. Understanding this relation and finding effective ways to support children is important for their mental health and academic success.
Anxiety can cause difficulty in spelling and the pressure of spelling can also trigger anxiety. It can become like a cycle.
Spelling involves many skills and cognitive processes such as phonological awareness, visual memory, auditory discrimination, attention, letter/sound correspondence… For children who struggle with spelling, the fear of making mistakes in front of classmates or receiving low grades can trigger anxiety.
This anxiety, in turn, may affect their ability to concentrate, leading to a cycle of academic underachievement and increased anxiety.
How to Support:
First of all, we need to make sure that the prerequisite skills needed for spelling are there. This includes phonological awareness skills such as (but not limited to):
Sound segmentation: For example, if the child hears the word “cloud”, he/she can segment it into its sounds /c/-/l/-/ou/-/d/.
Note: letters in / / are the sound, not the name of the letter.
Syllable segmentation: For example, if the child hears the multisyllabic word “tomorrow”, he/ she can segment it into its syllables “to/ mor/ row”.
Phoneme manipulation: this is the most difficult skill under phonological awareness, yet one of the most important and has a direct effect on spelling. It is the ability to hear individual sounds/ phonemes in words and manipulate/ change them. In other words, to delete, add or substitute sounds in words. For example: ask the child to say “fall” without /f/ (answer is all), or “zoom” without /m/ (answer is zoo), to say “mile” then to add /s/ in the beginning and say the new word (answer is smile), to say “dig” then to change /d/ into /b/ and say the new word (answer is “big”)…
Identifying English phonemes and rules: In English there are 26 letters and 44 phonemes and many rules. The child needs to learn the phonemes and make this connection between sounds/phonemes and letter shapes/ graphemes. For example, if a child doesn’t know the sound of /i-e/ and the rule of soft & hard /c/, how do we expect him/ her to write the word “like” correctly. The child might write “lik” for “like” if he doesn’t know the silent ‘e’/ split digraph /i-e/ and might write “lice” if he doesn’t know the rule of soft and hard ‘c’ and that ‘c’ says /s/ if it is followed by ‘i’, ‘e’ or ‘y’.
Knowledge of reading and spelling of tricky words based on the child’s academic level/ grade. Tricky words refer to words that don’t follow phonetic rules such as said, where, what, could…The child needs to be exposed to these words and given opportunities to read and spell them through multiple ways: orthographic mapping, multi-sensory approach, mnemonic strategies…
Encouraging a growth mindset: emphasizing that we learn from our mistakes. One tip I use with my students is that when a child makes 3 mistakes for example, I would correct and say “today you’ve learned how to spell 3 words correctly, mistakes help us learn and grow, how awesome is that”. Share with your child your own challenges and how you overcome them. If you hear a child saying “I can’t do this, it’s difficult for me”, encourage him/her to add the word “yet”; and say instead “I can’t do this yet.”
Providing short mental breaks (3- 5 minutes) before and during the spelling task, where the child gets to do something he/she enjoys.
Verbal prompting to use the provided tools and resources such as a writing checklist with pictures as a reminder for capitalization & punctuation, visuals for reversals, a finger spacer…
Providing a sounds mat, where sounds are presented in categories (i.e. all long a, e, o, u and i sounds, all r-vowel controlled sounds…)
Time to self-correct while re-reading the sentences and asking guided questions such as: “does that look familiar?”, “there are 3 ways to write this sound /ir/, /ur/, /er/, which one do you think is in this word? If you are not sure, write it and look at it, what do you think?”, or “let’s look at your sounds mat for all the long ‘a’ sounds, which one do you think is in the word “rain” ?…
Parents’ appreciating effort and progress, no matter how small it is, rather than focusing on perfection.
When practising spelling of the week or any words, try to avoid paper and pencil as much as possible. Your child would benefit more from making it fun, for example spell the words on shaving foam, coloured sand, salt, rice, sprinkles… as this will facilitate retaining the words.
Students might learn to spell words but when writing sentences they might repeat the same mistakes. That’s why it’s important to help them with transferring their knowledge and not assuming that it’s natural especially for students with challenges.
After teaching a certain phoneme/ sound and spelling words with that phoneme, it’s important to spell the same phoneme in sentences. This might be overwhelming for some. The child needs to think about capitalization, punctuation, spacing, spelling…. Some children might show behavioural problems to avoid the task, psychosomatic symptoms, crying, frustration, complaining….
It’s important to observe and understand what are the missing skills and work on them gradually and maybe to teach the child some techniques for reducing anxiety such as deep breathing and the 333 anxiety rule (name 3 things you see, 3 things you hear & move 3 parts of your body).
Conclusion:
By acknowledging the relationship between spelling and anxiety in children and implementing supportive strategies, we can empower them to overcome challenges, boost self esteem, and thrive academically and emotionally. With patience, understanding, and the right support system in place, every child can develop the confidence and skills needed to succeed in spelling and beyond.
You can always seek professional support if needed: If anxiety significantly impacts a child’s well-being or academic performance, consider consulting with an educational psychologist, child psychologist or special educator for specialised assistance.