Few studies have examined the effectiveness of methods to develop preservice teachers' phonemic, morphological and orthographic awareness for spelling instruction. Preservice teachers (n = 86) participated in 10 hours of metalinguistic coursework. The coursework focused on: phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, morphological awareness and utilising such information in spelling assessment. Measures from previous research were utilised to compare participants' performance with other preservice and inservice teachers of varying experience and expertise. The research cohort outperformed the preservice comparison group and their scores approximated that achieved by inservice teachers who had participated in 30 hours of professional development focused on building metalinguistic knowledge for spelling instruction. The results suggest that the coursework was effective at building students' phonemic, morphological and orthographic awareness and this information could be applied to support analysis of spelling errors. Implications for the effective preparation of literacy teachers within preservice programmes are discussed.