For example, one 10-year-old wrote: "We went to Echuca with my famly. We mist a week of school, yay! We do my favret sport warter sking. It is nice to be with famly. It is fun!"
This example is very familiar to researchers in this area. More than a third of our children are below national standards in writing and some of this is because of spelling.
Why is this happening? One complication is that spelling is low-status as a subject to teach. It is called a "surface" feature, which suggests it is mechanical, a skill, not important compared with "deep" features such as content and ideas.
Of course, you will never be a good writer if you do not have good ideas but if you can't spell it is awfully hard to express those ideas in print.
A second complication is that many teachers are concerned about spelling but are not sure how best to teach it - phonics was not part of their training and they desperately would like to teach spelling better.
A third complication is the digital age, our students are growing up in a world of instant messaging using different platforms in which invented spelling hz bcum gr8.
Students are receiving contradictory messages: at school, correct spelling is normal; outside of school, texting, Snapchat, tweets are in abbreviated textspeak, and as long as it sounds right then this is also normal. The irony is that good spellers are also good at textspeak - they can move between the two.
Research shows that if they find even a few spelling errors in an essay a teacher's rating of the work will drop substantially. A single spelling mistake can ruin the chance of a job when you send in an application.
In the workplace, a text message or email sent with a spelling mistake puts the sender and the company in a bad light.
Spelling is more important than ever. Yes, there are predictive spell-checkers, and this technology helps, but a lot of spelling mistakes slip through. Students who struggle with spelling are particularly on the back foot because the spell-check software is often not sure what they have written and can give a word they did not mean to say.
Phonics teaching does help tremendously with spelling because it teaches students rules. Phonics may not give complete accuracy but it usually puts you 90 per cent there in terms of accuracy; the last 10 per cent will come with lots of reading and writing practice.
And yet we do not capitalise on phonics as a teaching strategy. In most classrooms, students are given a list of words to learn on Monday and tested on Friday. Yes, many students will learn how to spell by this rote method but many will not.
I'm not saying that phonics is the whole answer but it is a fantastic foundation that children can build on to become great readers and spellers. A study in Scotland found that children taught intensive phonics in their first year of school were years ahead of a control group who had not received such intensive instruction when tested for reading and spelling in Year 7.
These results convinced the English government to change their teaching to intensive phonics. Each year, schools in England now have children sit a compulsory national phonics check and children's skills are rapidly improving.
Australia is also looking at introducing a phonics check.
Do we really want Australia to beat us at spelling? This is not a pleasant prospect.
Phonics is a pathway to better spelling and writing and we are letting many of our little heroes become zeros by not teaching them this.
