Dictation for spelling?

I have been experimenting on and off this year with using dictation for spelling. Having tried various programmes in my classroom - Chunk, Check, Cheer, Joy Allock and more recently Kiwiphonics, I continue to be frustrated with children's lack of ability to transfer spelling knowledge into thier writing. I have found various blog postings about dictation - see below, and also have informal feedback from teachers that it is successful so I am hoping that this works. I am hoping that dictation will help children to more accurately record the sounds they can hear - particularly word endings - ed, ing etc and also using the chunks of sounds that they know make the sound. After we have dictated a piece, the children and I work through it together and they are becoming more skilled at identifying spelling patterns as we read through it after the dictation.

http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/06/dictation-goes-web-20.html
http://higherupandfurtherin.blogspot.com/2006/09/teaching-spelling-through-studied.html
http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/JocelynJames/418875/

Spelling

An ongoing concern with children's writing for me has always been with their transference of spelling knowledge into their daily writing. I have got some ideas for word study from Words Their Way and am going to trial these as a reading activity. This is to do with sorting words into groups with long and short vowel sounds. I am also going to use early readers to give children daily dictation as anecdotally I have heard that this improves children's spelling.. Yet to find evidence in research on this.