Teaching children with dyslexia to spell in a reading-writers' workshop

• Published in: Annals of dyslexia Vol. 63; no. 1; pp. 1 - 24
• Main Authors: Berninger, Virginia W., Lee, Yen-Ling, Abbott, Robert D., Breznitz, Zvia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer 01.04.2013; Springer US; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adolescent; After School Programs; Child; Child Health; Children; Children & youth; Decoding; Decoding (Reading); Dyslexia; Dyslexia - epidemiology; Dyslexia - therapy; Education; Education - methods; Female; Humans; Instructional Effectiveness; Interdisciplinary Approach; Language and Literature; Language Development; Learning disabilities; Linguistics; Male; Neurology; Oral Reading; Orthographies; Outcomes of Treatment; Phonemes; Phonological Awareness; Phonology; Pretests; Psycholinguistics; Reading; Reading Programs; Reading Skills; Reading Writing Relationship; Social Sciences; Special Needs Students; Spelling; Spelling Instruction; Students; Teaching; Teaching - methods; Working memory; Workshops; Writing; Writing instruction; Writing Skills; Morphological awareness instruction for dyslexia; Orthographic strategies instruction for dyslexia; Phonological decoding instruction for dyslexia; Integrated reading-writing instruction; Rapid accelerated program for reading fluency
• ISSN: 0736-9387; 1934-7243; 1934-7243
• DOI: 10.1007/s11881-011-0054-0

To identify effective treatment for both the spelling and word decoding problems in dyslexia, 24 students with dyslexia in grades 4 to 9 were randomly assigned to treatments A (n = 12) or B (n = 12) in an after-school reading-writers' workshop at the university (thirty 1-h sessions twice a week over 5 months). First, both groups received step 1 treatment of grapheme—phoneme correspondences (gpc) for oral reading. At step 2, treatment A received gpc training for both oral reading and spelling, and treatment B received gpc training for oral reading and phonological awareness. At step 3, treatment A received orthographic spelling strategy and rapid accelerated reading program (RAP) training, and treatment B continued step 2 training. At step 4, treatment A received morphological strategies and RAP training, and treatment B received orthographic spelling strategy training. Each treatment also had the same integrated reading—writing activities, which many school assignments require. Both groups improved significantly in automatic letter writing, spelling real words, compositional fluency, and oral reading (decoding) rate. Treatment A significantly outperformed treatment B in decoding rate after step 3 orthographic training, which in turn uniquely predicted spelling real words. Letter processing rate increased during step 3 RAP training and correlated significantly with two silent reading fluency measures. Adding orthographic strategies with "working memory in mind" to phonics helps students with dyslexia spell and read English words.