Difficulties of developing secondary school students’ spelling skills

The paper presents theoretical approaches to secondary school students’ spelling rule acquisition. It defines the main terms: spelling, skill, spelling skill, spelling activities, spelling task, spelling observation and control skill, dysgraphia, dysorthography. The author describes types of spelling skills developed at school: finding parts of words spelt according to the spelling rules, spelling words according to the rules, graphic marking of difficult spelling, finding and correcting spelling mistakes. The paper reveals conditions and criteria of successful school students’ spelling skills development: high scientific level of teaching spelling, correlation of spelling skills and speech development, knowledge of spelling rules and the scheme of their application, a thoroughly developed system of exercises to practice the rules. The author focuses on difficulties of using these rules in writing: difficulties of spelling rules acquisition caused by spelling rules variety, poor formedness of cognition, low motivation level, inability to process information and difficulties in applying spelling rules related to spelling task setting and its solution. The author describes mistakes caused by poor spelling rules acquisition such as mistakes in words and their significant parts, mistakes in cursive, separate and hyphenate word spelling, mistakes in capital and small letter usage, mistakes in word break. Differential diagnostics of specific spelling mistakes is presented. The types of dysorthography and their characteristics are defined. The paper lists the principles of Russian spelling the breach of which results in mistakes.