Spelling and dictation: what schools test

Two tests that look similar and are not

In a spelling test your child hears one word at a time, in no particular context, and writes it. In a dictation they hear a whole passage, read in phrases, and write it out with its capital letters, its full stops and its commas in place.

Parents often treat these as the same exercise at two lengths. They are not. A child can score full marks on Friday's spelling list and lose half the marks in a dictation on the same words, and the reason is that the dictation is testing several things at once and the spelling test is testing one.

Knowing which is which changes how you prepare, and usually saves time rather than costing it.

What a spelling test is marking

A spelling test marks one thing: can your child produce the letters of this word, from memory, in order. It is unforgiving and it is narrow, and that narrowness is what makes it easy to practise. There is a list, the list is finite, and every word on it either goes in or does not.

That is why the preparation is so mechanical. Test first to find the words that fail, repair those words one letter at a time, re-test a day later, and keep the old misses somewhere you can find them. Nothing about a spelling list rewards cleverness. It rewards finding the small group of words that are genuinely not known and spending the week's time there.

What a dictation is marking

A dictation marks spelling too, but it adds three jobs on top, and each of them costs marks on its own.

The first is holding a phrase in your head. A child has to keep six or eight words in working memory while writing the first of them, and a child who has to think hard about spelling "beautiful" will lose the rest of the sentence while they do it. This is why fluent spelling matters beyond the spelling test itself: every word that is automatic frees up room for the sentence.

The second is punctuation. Capital letters at the start and for names, full stops, commas, question marks, and sometimes inverted commas around speech. In most dictations this is worth a serious share of the marks and is the part least likely to have been practised at home.

The third is pace. The passage is read at a fixed speed, usually once whole and then in phrases, and a child who stops to perfect one word falls behind and loses several. Learning to leave a word, keep up, and come back to it is a skill of its own, and it is best learnt somewhere the stakes are low.

Preparing for both without doing everything twice

The good news is that the two overlap where it counts. Fluent spelling is the foundation of a good dictation, so the weekly list work is not separate preparation; it is most of it.

What the list work does not cover is punctuation and pace, and those need a passage. Once a week is enough. Read a short paragraph aloud in phrases, at ordinary speed, and let your child write it. Then mark it in two passes: first the spelling, then the punctuation, separately, so a child who has spelt everything correctly can see that plainly even if the full stops were missing.

Do not slow down to be kind. A dictation read gently at home prepares your child for a dictation that will not be read gently at school. If they cannot keep up, make the passage shorter rather than slower.

A note on how the passage is read

The way a passage is read aloud changes the test completely. Some teachers say the punctuation out loud, naming each full stop and comma; others expect the child to hear it in the phrasing. Some break long sentences into short chunks, others read a whole sentence at a time. It is worth asking your child which way their class does it, because practising the other way is close to practising a different exam.

Spelling Stars handles both kinds of list. A spelling list is one word per line, read aloud one word at a time with no context, and your child spells each one without seeing it. A dictation list takes a passage instead, and you choose whether the punctuation is named aloud and whether long sentences are broken into shorter chunks, so the practice can match the way your child's own teacher reads.

What to do if the two scores disagree

If your child scores well on spelling lists and badly on dictation, the spelling is probably fine and the problem is punctuation, pace or memory for a phrase. Practise passages, mark the punctuation separately, and shorten the phrases before you shorten anything else.

If the dictation score is respectable but individual spellings are weak, it is the other way round: the sentence work is holding up and the words underneath it are not. Go back to short daily list practice and let the passages wait.

The scores disagreeing is not a contradiction. It is the most useful diagnostic you will get all term.