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Spelling
In terms of literacy we refer to spelling as orthography, the study of the relationship between grapheme arrangements, sounds, and meaning.
Spelling often refers to the encoding of graphemes to the correct order while phonics refers more to the mapping of graphemes to sound. Yet many people spell by, “Sounding it out.” Ehri's (1992) integrative theory postulates that we developing spelling like phonics systematically through letter-sound knowledge and partial phonological cu es form the basis for visual word-recognition skills.
Ehri noted that children who do not know the English spelling system, “are left with rote memorization which takes longer and is more easily forgotten.”
Thus you can not differentiate from phonics and spelling beyond possibly the difference between decoding and encoding or mapping graphemes to sound and meaning rather than just sound.
What does Research Say
Explicit instruction in spelling works. In a meta-analysis of 53 studies that comprised over 6,000 students Graham & Santagelo (2014) found that explicit instruction had a strong effect ) or informal/incidental approaches to improving spelling performance such as relying on writing instruction or doing “worked work” during interactive read alouds.
Increasing the amount of formal spelling instruction also proved beneficial also had a strong effect on learners. More importantly gains in spelling were maintained over time and transferred over to correct spelling when writing.
In other words stop weighting mechanics so hard in writing rubrics and teach more explicit spelling if you want to see improvements in the spelling of student writing. Teach writing when assessing writing and assess spelling when teaching spelling.
Explicit instruction in spelling also had effects on reading overall. Spelling had a strong effect on phonological awareness. Mapping graphemes to sounds improves our ability to recognize and manipulate phonemes. In fact explicit spelling instruction had a moderate effect on reading skills overall. If you want to know a students level of phonics understanding, basically check their spelling.
Much of the research in teaching early-childhood and elementary spelling involves the analysis of invented spelling. Charles Read (1971) first mapped inventive spelling to students understanding of phonemes. Inventive spelling then became a diagnostic tool to measure a students understanding of word knowledge (Invernizzi, Abouzeid, & Gill, 1994).