Spelling

Wouldn't life be easier if spell checking software could help our dyslexic students? Well, of course it can help many less experienced writers, but it doesn't help those who confuse 'flower' and 'flour', or 'their' and 'there', or 'practice' and 'practise'. In fact, Word might even insert an error: in some versions of Word, if a person types 'I am going to do my piano practize', the software will automatically correct the misspelling to 'piano practise', which is wrong. The spelling should be 'practice' for the noun, and 'practise' for the verb, and 'piano practice' is a noun phrase.

From about age 8 most children have many more words firmly in long-term memory and write them as units. When attempting to write unfamiliar words, they will try to represent all the phonemes of the spoken words in the correct order, but will often produce homophone errors. They are also typically more aware not only of different ways of spelling phonemes but also of word families and spelling patterns which guide choices between graphemes, and use them to write unfamiliar words - all of which are visual and not phonic strategies - the nature of English orthography demands both.

This stage is typical of children aged about 6 to 7. They begin to use phonic strategies - attempting to 'sound out' words they don't yet know as wholes, and writing a single letter or multi-letter grapheme for each phoneme, sometimes making 'letter-name' errors in the process. They may continue to write words they knew at the logographic stage as before, or try to write (some of) those words phonically and thus stray from the correct spelling to a homophonic one, before returning to the correct version.

Beginning spellers of about age 5 or 6 typically learn a core vocabulary (often including their first name and some other words important to them, and some high-frequency words) using a purely non-phonic, 'rote-learning' strategy - for them putting a word down on paper is simply a matter of writing the letters in the sequence they know, and they have no strategy for using elements of those words to write new ones. As a result, their attempts to write new words may consist of strings of letters which bear little or no relation to the target words.

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There are dozens of programs available to support writing and spelling, many of which have been devised with the goal of supporting those who are dyslexic, or who have failed to make normal progress.

A whole-school spelling policy

Primary schools

A defining feature of dyslexics is that they reverse letters- either at the single letter level ('d' instead of 'b') or at the word level ('saw' for 'was'). Right?

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!