Why Children With Dyslexia Struggle With Writing and How to Help Them

Abstract

Purpose: Children with dyslexia often have related writing difficulties. In the simple view of writing model, high-quality writing depends on good transcription skills, working memory, and executive function-all of which can be difficult for children with dyslexia and result in poor spelling and low overall writing quality. In this article, we describe the challenges of children with dyslexia in terms of the simple view of writing and instructional strategies to increase spelling and overall writing quality in children with dyslexia.

Method: For spelling strategies, we conducted systematic searches across 2 databases for studies examining the effectiveness of spelling interventions for students with dyslexia as well as including studies from 2 meta-analyses. To locate other instructional practices to increase writing quality (e.g., handwriting and executive function), we examined recent meta-analyses of writing and supplemented that by conducting forward searches.

Results: Through the search, we found evidence of effective remedial and compensatory intervention strategies in spelling, transcription, executive function, and working memory. Some strategies included spelling using sound-spellings and morphemes and overall quality using text structure, sentence combining, and self-regulated strategy development.

Conclusions: Many students with dyslexia experience writing difficulty in multiple areas. However, their writing (and even reading) skills can improve with the instructional strategies identified in this article. We describe instructional procedures and provide links to resources throughout the article.

Figure 1.

A model of the simple view of writing.

Figure 2.

A writing sample from Jordan, a fourth-grade student with reading disability as identified by performance on word reading tests. The transcribed text follows (misspelled words followed by asterisks): The game is battelships*. I like it because I get to play with frinds* and I like ships beause* their big. Plaing* with frinds* are fun to play with them But I ushal win.

Figure 3.

A representation of the difference between decoding (pronouncing written words by linking graphemes to phonemes and combining them) and encoding (writing spoken words by parsing the words into graphemes and writing each using knowledge of grapheme–phoneme correspondences and spelling conventions). In the spellings, the good reader has overapplied the spelling convention that ay is the spelling of /eɪ/ at the end of a word. If the written word looks incorrect, the spelling might be adjusted to writing the letters and adjusting the spelling as needed afterward. The good reader might realize that staiers looks incorrect and rewrite it correctly. Problems with encoding are particularly pronounced in people with dyslexia because encoding requires the ability to process the sound information correctly and represent it on the page. The reader with dyslexia in Figure 3 does not include the T—probably because of difficulty processing sound information.

Figure 4.

Examples of activities in phonics lessons that improve reading and spelling.

Figure 5.

An example of a spelling dictation activity. In spelling dictation, the teacher has children systematically spell words by breaking them into phonemes and writing the associated graphemes one at a time after the teacher's cues. In this example, the teacher has a set of cards where each card represents an English phoneme (or associated phonemes, as in r-controlled vowels). The image on each card contains the target phoneme and serves as a reminder of the pronunciation. Each card contains the most common spellings of the phoneme. For /ʧ/, the card includes both CH and TCH. The spellings sometimes include devices to help with spelling, such as the blank before TCH that indicates it cannot come at the beginning of a word. In this example, the teacher reminds the children of this pattern before they write the word to support them in selecting the correct one of the two.

Figure 6.

Examples of handwriting activities in a multicomponent lesson.

Figure 7.

A nonexhaustive set of example exercises to illustrate how sentence combining can be used to teach and facilitate higher order language use in students' writing.

Figure 8.

Examples of complex sentence combining exercises that can be used to teach sophisticated language use in writing within and across sentences.

Figure 9.

Examples of self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) strategy mnemonics.

Figure 10.

An example information frame used in the Structures Writing program to teach students how to organize and write a simple description passage.