Sami Wansink was a good speller when she went to the University of Canberra to study teaching, but she was not alone in not knowing why some words were seemingly spelt or pronounced strangely.
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A fourth year unit with Misty Adoniou, a literacy educator, opened her eyes to the history of the complex language she had never considered.
''It was quite confronting in a way because it makes you realise all the things you don't know – and you're about to go and teach children,'' Mrs Wansink said.
Dr Adoniou had recognised spelling was a skill children were ''quite poor at'' and realised teachers were deficient when it came to teaching it.
''Good spellers know that spelling isn't trying to remember a string of letters in the right order; they know the word itself gives you lots of clues what the letters will be,'' Dr Adoniou said.
''I thought what I'll do is improve my students' knowledge of how words work … they'd also understand the etymology, the history of our language, because it's actually the history which explains what we call 'crazy spelling'.''
She explained, for example, the word ''cupboard'' came from a time when houses were small and cups were kept on a shelf.
While houses and storage needs evolved over the centuries, the word cupboard has remained descriptive of its origins, explaining the seemingly random ''p''.
Dr Adoniou put her teachings to the test in 2012 when she had one of her graduates stage a two-term intervention with a year 2 class.
The teacher threw out the spelling lists to be memorised, and introduced word study instead.
The results – which were published in the British journal Literacy – showed every child who had scored 0 to 2 out of 10 before the intervention scored 6 or above afterwards, and could name more strategies they used to work out the spelling than phonetics alone.
''People don't think it's appropriate to do word history with a kid who's struggling with writing,'' Dr Adoniou said. ''They think that's a bit highfalutin and out of their range, but it was actually those stories which seemed to make the most impact on those low-achieving children.''
Mrs Wansink now teaches at Macquarie Primary School and introduced the teaching technique as she goes on a ''learning journey" with her year 1 and 2 children.
While still relatively early in the year, the feedback has been in listening to her students.
"I've noticed it in the way they speak about words … they're picking 'that must be past tense because there's an e-d on the end', or 'maybe that word's Greek because it's got a p-h','' she said.
