In this study, written compositions were obtained from each of the elementary students during the four years of testing. The students were shown silent movies--thereby eliminating any possibility of providing spelling clues--and were then asked to write their compositions explaining how the movie made them feel or what they say in the movie. The subjects included 61 children taught by the initial teaching alphabet medium and 100 children taught by traditional orghography. The methods used to analyze the data were the one-way analysis of variance and T-tests for paired comparisons or correlated groups. It was found that there were no significant differences in spelling scores between students taught in the initial teaching alphabet medium and students taught by traditional orthography. Some of the conclusions were that the initial teaching alphabet girls made significantly higher spelling scores than did the initial teaching alphabet boys in the sixth grade of school, though not in grades three through five; and the traditional orthography students made significant gains in spelling scores from fourth grade through the sixth grade. (Author/TS)