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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. The US Constitution is modeled on that of the five nations (Iroquois tribe).

  2. Although we used carefully selected parts from this book in the current study, the lessons in Berninger and Wolf (2009) for step 2 are based on the reading source used in step 1 because some of the chapters in this book are more appropriate for older students than those who participated in this study.

  3. Treatment A did repeated oral readings using scanned pages from If I Lived in an Iroquois Village. Children read orally as one word at a time was highlighted and synchronized with child’s oral reading rate during the rereadings. Kurzweil software was used for scanning, highlighting, and synchronizing the rate. Treatment B did repeated readings in the Reading Naturally (Ihnot, 1997) hard copy version. Treatment groups did not differ significantly in either silent reading fluency measure given.

  4. This test was revised and renormed with scaled scores for all subtests in 2007.

  5. For treatment-relevant, differential diagnosis of dysgraphia, dyslexia, and oral and written language learning disability within a working memory model with three word forms and syntax storage and processing units, phonological and orthographic loops, and a panel of executive functions for self-regulating the writing and reading process (inhibition/focus, switching/flexibility, sustaining, self-monitoring and updating), see Berninger (2008), Silliman and Berninger (2011), and Berninger slide charts posted on the IDA web site for Symposium on Working Memory organized by Michele Berg and presented 27 October 2010 at the International Dyslexia Association, Phoenix Convention Center, Phoenix, AZ.

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Acknowledgment

The authors thank the graduate research associates who served as teachers in the after school workshops, Maggie May O’Malley, Christine Mielenz, Kelly Nielsen, Kelly Reinhard, and Morgan Poster, and the research coordinator, Patricia Stock, who assisted with scheduling and other administrative tasks.

Disclosure

The first author is an author or co-author of the books that contain instructional materials validated in prior research (Berninger, 1998; Berninger & Abbott, 2003; Berninger & Wolf, 2009) and the test (PAL; Berninger, 2001) that has measures developed by Psychological Corporation based on prior research for which the first author was a principal investigator; both the instructional materials and test were used in this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, 322 Miller, Box 353600, Seattle, WA, 98195-3600, USA

    Virginia W. Berninger & Yen-Ling Lee

  2. University of Washington, 312 Miller, Box 353600, Seattle, WA, 98195-3600, USA

    Robert D. Abbott

  3. Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, 31905, Haifa, Israel

    Zvia Breznitz

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  1. Virginia W. Berninger
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  2. Yen-Ling Lee
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  4. Zvia Breznitz
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Correspondence to Virginia W. Berninger.

Additional information

Based on research that was supported by HD25858 and P50 33812 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Prepared for a special issue of Annals of Dyslexia on Writing Instruction and Writing Development (Guest Editors Brett Miller and Tanya Shuy).

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Berninger, V.W., Lee, YL., Abbott, R.D. et al. Teaching children with dyslexia to spell in a reading-writers’ workshop. Ann. of Dyslexia 63, 1–24 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-011-0054-0

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