Last week, one of my colleagues asked me if poor spelling meant that a student was dyslexic. It’s a great question, and in light of our focus on dyslexia last month, I thought I would spend this month’s newsletter unpacking that question.
The simple answer is “no”. Poor spellers are not always dyslexic. To understand this, let’s begin with a quick review. Reading text involves the decoding process, while writing text involves encoding. We will see a little later how the two coding processes do correlate and have strong relationships, but they do operate independently, and it is good to remember that the one is more than just the reverse engineering of the other.
It is entirely possible to be a strong reader but a terrible speller. In fact, there is a related disability more specific to orthography (spelling) known as dysgraphia. While trouble spelling is certainly an indicator of dyslexia, poor spelling could also be connected to other causes like poor motor control, bad handwriting, ADHD, or even Selective Language Impairments.
With all of that said, poor spelling can be a helpful clue for reading specialists in diagnosing dyslexia. If the other causes of dysgraphia can be accounted for-- in other words, if we can eliminate some of those other factors as a cause of the spelling mistakes-- then it is likely the result of a reading disorder.
Again, to be sure that we are all using the same understanding of dyslexia, let’s review the most telling indicators: a lack of phonemic awareness (being able to recognize the different sounds that a word has in it), disfluent and error prone oral reading, reduced processing speed, limited knowledge of orthography / spelling, deficits in working memory, and limits on vocabulary size.
At the high school level, reading disorders can be even trickier to diagnose because there are many more factors that could be at play. For example, it could be a matter of neuro-divergence, where the brain simply doesn’t fire the same way for some people. In those cases, the neuro pathways fundamental to reading need to be explicitly taught to readers. For others, trauma and / or interrupted schooling could be the cause. In other words, their brains fire in more conventional ways, but they just didn’t get that explicit instruction necessary to decode text. Finally, some just didn’t have adequate access to quality instruction.
An important part of the equation at the high school level is getting the necessary buy-in from the reader. After years of little (or very slow) growth, older students begin to internalize the beliefs that they simply cannot do it or that reading isn’t worth the effort. By employing a number of adaptive approaches, readers who struggle find other ways to either access the information or avoid the work all together.
So what does this mean for our classrooms and how can we help our students access the help they need?
Writing: Track student writing, especially on occasions when they do it by hand. Do you notice substantial mistakes in their spelling. More than just your common misspellings, misspelled words by students with dysgraphia and / or dyslexia will be virtually unrecognizable. Again, poor spelling alone is not a guarantee that the student has a reading problem, but it is a good superficial indicator.
Read Aloud: If you worry about whether a student’s reading difficulties might be severe, find an opportunity to have them privately read a paragraph aloud to you. Ideally, it should be something from one of your assigned texts. This gives you a more authentic indicator of their capabilities within your content area. A young person with substantial reading problems will be noticeable. They will read very slowly or their reading with be really disfluent, and they will either skip over difficult words or struggle to decode them.
Dialogue: Ask the student how the readings have been going. Ask them if they have been doing the readings, or if they find them difficult or hard to understand. You might tell them some of your observations and how you wonder if they might benefit from a little extra help with the readings. Depending on the circumstances, you might want to follow-up with the family and / or the student’s counselor to indicate your concerns. And, of course, contact me. These are delicate conversations. Yet, they are also quite necessary. There are many different resources available to students and families and just letting them know of these options helps them to make informed decisions.
Read the full newsletter here.
