does good spelling help reading?

As far as I can tell, no one knows the answer to this question for sure.

My sense is that people who research spelling expect the answer will be 'yes,' which is what I expect, too.

Much about spelling is puzzling. Our society expects that any educated person can spell, yet literate adults commonly characterize themselves as poor spellers and make spelling mistakes. Many children have trouble spelling, but we do not know how many, or in relation to what standard, because state accountability assessments seldom include a direct measure of spelling competence. Few state standards specify what, exactly, a student at each grade level should be able to spell, and most subsume spelling under broad topics such as written composition and language proficiency. State writing tests may not even score children on spelling accuracy, as they prefer to lump it in with other “mechanical” skills in the scoring rubrics.

Nevertheless, research has shown that learning to spell and learning to read rely on much of the same underlying knowledge — such as the relationships between letters and sounds — and, not surprisingly, that spelling instruction can be designed to help children better understand that key knowledge, resulting in better reading. Catherine Snow et al. summarize the real importance of spelling for reading as follows: “Spelling and reading build and rely on the same mental representation of a word. Knowing the spelling of a word makes the representation of it sturdy and accessible for fluent reading.” In fact, Ehri and Snowling found that the ability to read words “by sight” (i.e. automatically) rests on the ability to map letters and letter combinations to sounds. Because words are not very visually distinctive (for example, car, can, cane), it is impossible for children to memorize more than a few dozen words unless they have developed insights into how letters and sounds correspond. Learning to spell requires instruction and gradual integration of information about print, speech sounds, and meaning — these, in turn, support memory for whole words, which is used in both spelling and sight reading.

How Spelling Supports Reading by Louisa Moats (pdf file)

I briefly told my own story of C. beginning to read again after starting Megawords. Until 4th grade, C. had been a terrific early reader, years ahead of grade level. He was one of those kids who more or less taught himself to read.

Then, going into 5th grade (I think), he had stopped reading, right on schedule. Apparently it's not uncommon for good readers to "lose interest" around that age, or so I had read. Google isn't giving me a reference to good readers experiencing a 4th grade slump, so memory will have to serve; I think I'd read about a "good reader slump" in a book on the subject of making your child into a lifelong reader, or some such.

C. was also, and I don't think this is a coincidence, a terrible speller. Excellent reader, terrible speller.

That is an interesting thing about spelling, btw.

It is possible to be an excellent reader and a poor speller.

It is not possible to be an excellent speller and a poor reader. (I think I have this on the authority of Moats; will have to check.)

Not long after we started work with Megawords, he began to read again.

My guess is that perhaps Megawords helped him focus on decoding syllables instead of letters. He'd just started the series, so he hadn't learned the various syllables, suffixes, prefixes, that Megawords teaches.....which is why I think Megawords may simply have pushed him to start focusing on natural breaks in words. I'm guessing, too, that he was such a good "natural" reader (I feel pretty confident making that statement) that once he'd been told, by Megawords, to look at syllables instead of letters, he picked this skill up quickly.

Fifth grade was also the year he had the brilliant Ms. Duque as his teacher. In class, she had the kids read out loud by syllables. They used their fingers to cover up each syllable in a word as they went along.

So he had Megawords at home, and "syllabic reading" at school..... and he is today, in 8th grade, a good reader.

My feeling about spelling and reading is: better safe than sorry.

If it's even possible spelling may support reading, it's irresponsible of schools not to teach it.