The authors of the article focus on the difficulties experienced by younger students in mastering the spelling norms of the Russian language. This is the inability to immediately distinguish in the consciousness of the signified and signifying, the inability to correctly determine the word stress and a number of others. The teacher should know the methods of formation of students ' concept of "phoneme" and the ability to recognize other phonetic units of the language. It is emphasized that the phonetic work should precede the graphic one, based on the development of the speech-motor apparatus. The authors present a description of some methods of formation of the phonetic competence, such as: exercises on the distinction between words as lexical units and as a "phonetic word", the correct syllabification, accent, modelling, awareness similarsocial functions.