This is Part One of a five-part series about how to support and accommodate middle-schoolers, high-schoolers and adults with dyslexia.
I’ve had many older students confess to me that they would rather be thought of as defiant than stupid. Many students with undiagnosed dyslexia suffer from anxiety. Depending on the severity of their language challenges, the student may opt out of activities to avoid being put on the spot or placed under pressure to perform.
Seventy to 80% of people with poor reading skills likely have dyslexia. It’s the job of educators and administrators to find and support students who are struggling academically, no matter their age. There is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” speller. By accepting the “good” or “bad” speller idea, it absolves us from doing anything to improve the outcome. Think about how much damage has been done in the field of teaching mathematics by falling back on the erroneous idea that some people are simply “good” or “bad” at math. Simply put, people struggle with math or spelling for the same reasons. Many educators have not been given the training and resources to accommodate students with dyslexia, and especially older students with dyslexia who are out of the initial learning curve of reading.
The Sound-to-Symbol Relationship
English is a phonemic language, meaning the sound-to-symbol relationship is very important. When young students learn to spell, they often rely heavily on the sound-to-symbol relationship to spell words. However, when a language has a deep orthography, as is the case with English, the sound-to-symbol mapping for many words is not straightforward. As students become more competent spellers, they learn how to recognize and spell unusual or irregular sound-to-letter patterns.
Less transparent spelling patterns are a primary struggle for older students with dyslexia. For this reason, educators, parents, and administrators working with students who are struggling in the upper grades should look at an older student’s written work to assess for signs of an undiagnosed language-based learning difficulty. The spelling errors will often be consistent, with short, common words misspelled simply because they are not phonetically regular, such as “the” or “was.”
To teach older students to spell more effectively, educators should be using an etymology background to trace the origins of the words along with the morphology, or parts of the words. There are excellent books on the topic. Two of my favorites are Unlocking Literacy by Marcia K. Henry and Maryanne Wolf and Bringing Words to Life by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan.
For the entire article, please click here.