11 plus Spellings questions

What a Spellings question looks like

Spellings is one of the English formats in the 11 plus, and it is the most direct of them. Your child sees one word on the screen, printed large and also standing inside a short sentence, with a single question above it: “Is this spelled correctly?” Its near neighbour, Spot the Misspelling, gives a whole sentence broken into labelled parts and asks which part contains the error, so a child there only has to locate the fault. Spellings goes a step further and asks them to produce the right version of the word, chosen from four spellings that differ from one another by a letter or two.

The choices come in two halves. The first is simply “This is correct”. Beneath it, after a line reading “or pick the correct spelling”, sit four full spellings of the word. If the word shown is already right, those four are all wrong. If it is wrong, the correct spelling is one of the four and the other three are wrong in different ways.

That first choice is what makes the format harder than it sounds. Most of the time the word shown is misspelt, so children fall into the habit of hunting for a better version, and a correctly spelt word slides straight past them. The sentence matters too, because it settles which word is meant, and that is the whole difference between “alter” and “altar”. A button beside the word reads it aloud, and once an answer is given the correct spelling appears with a short reminder of the rule behind it.

Example one: a word with a wrong ending

The screen shows harmfull, in the sentence “Too much sugar is harmfull to your teeth, so brush them well.”

Read it in two parts: harm, then the ending. That ending sounds like “full”, which is why so many children accept it. When “full” is joined to the end of another word it loses one of its Ls: harmful, plentiful, careful, beautiful. So this word is wrong, and the version to look for ends in a single L.

The answer is harmful.

The other spellings offered are harmfell, harmfill and haarmful. Two of them swap the ending for something else again, and the third gets the ending right but doubles a letter at the start. The one to take is the option that fixes the fault your child has already named and changes nothing else.

Example two: two endings that sound the same

The screen shows independant, in the sentence “Now she can tie her own laces, Ava feels very independant.”

Say it aloud and the last part is a soft mumble: “ant” and “ent” sound identical there, so the ear gives no help and a rule has to. The word is built out of “depend”, and its family keeps the “e” all the way through: depend, dependent, independent.

The answer is independent.

The other three on offer, indepindent, independint and independunt, each change a single vowel: two of them at the ending, one in the middle of “depend”. When the options differ from one another by one vowel, the vowel is what is being tested.

Example three: the word is already right

The screen shows courageous, in the sentence “Diving into the cold lake to rescue the puppy was truly courageous.”

Most words in the “ous” family drop the letter before the ending: fame becomes famous, nerve becomes nervous. Courage does not, because the “e” is what keeps the “g” soft. Take it out and the word would read with a hard “g”, like “gap”. So courageous is correct as it stands.

The answer is This is correct.

The tempting option is couragous, and it tempts precisely because a child who has learned the famous and nervous pattern applies it with confidence. A child who has already decided the word must be wrong somewhere will take it and feel quite sure about it.

How to answer it

1. Read the word inside the sentence rather than on its own. That settles which word is meant, which matters for the ones that sound like a different word altogether.
2. Say it slowly in syllables and decide whether it looks right before reading the four spellings underneath. Deciding first stops the options talking your child out of a word that was correct.
3. If it looks wrong, name the fault: the ending, a double letter that should be single, a single letter that should be double, or a letter that has gone missing.
4. Now find the option that fixes that one fault and changes nothing else, comparing the spellings where they differ rather than reading each from the start.
5. Check the ending last, because that is where most of these words come apart: “ant” or “ent”, “ous” or “us”, “ible” or “able”, one L or two.

Common mistakes

• Assuming there is always something wrong. Some words shown are already spelt correctly, and the honest answer is to leave them alone. A child who never once chooses “This is correct” gives away marks they had already earned.
• Doubling the L on “ful” endings. Harmfull and plentifull both look right and both are wrong. That ending takes one L every time, however full the word feels.
• Swapping “ant” and “ent”. Independant, hesitent, eminant and ignorent all circulate widely. The ear cannot separate those endings, so the word family has to do the work.
• Losing a double letter, or inventing one. Sucessor, ocupy and beligerent go one way; abbundant and calamity with two Ls go the other.
• Trusting how the word sounds. Rediculous, emfasise and sincronise are all faithful to the sound and wrong on the page. English spelling records where a word came from as much as how it is said.

How to practise 11 plus Spellings questions

Spelling is one of the few parts of the eleven plus where a few minutes a day genuinely compounds, because a word learned properly stays learned. The most useful thing to do at home is keep a running list of the words your child actually gets wrong, rather than somebody else’s list of hard words, and come back to it a week later and again a month later. Ask them to say the word in syllables as they write it, and to say aloud what the fault was when they miss one, because naming it is what makes it stick. Ten focused minutes beats an hour of copying out, which is the pattern we set out in how much 11 plus practice a child needs each day. 11+ Daily has a Spellings project alongside the other English formats, on laptop, tablet or phone, and the rest of them are listed on our 11 plus English practice page. Every question is original to 11+ Daily, nothing is a past paper and nothing is licensed from another publisher, and the bank is re-checked in rounds.

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