A Synthesis of Spelling and Reading Interventions and Their Effects on the Spelling Outcomes of Students With LD

Abstract

Previous research studies examining the effects of spelling and reading interventions on the spelling outcomes of students with learning disabilities (LD) are synthesized. An extensive search of the professional literature between 1995 and 2003 yielded a total of 19 intervention studies that provided spelling and reading interventions to students with LD and measured spelling outcomes. Findings revealed that spelling outcomes were consistently improved following spelling interventions that included explicit instruction with multiple practice opportunities and immediate corrective feedback after the word was misspelled. Furthermore, evidence from spelling interventions that employed assistive technology aimed at spelling in written compositions indicated positive effects on spelling outcomes.

Eficácia do programa de remediação fonológica e leitura no distúrbio de aprendizagem

“…The students from GIE and GIIE showed better performance in tasks of syllabic identification and manipulation from the initial sessions of the remediation program indicating that the awareness of syllables is more perceptible than that of phonemes, according to what is described in literature (6,17,19).…”

“…In the phonological and reading remediation program, the improvement in the performance of the students in tasks of alphabet recognition, synthesis, segmentation, substitution and phonemic transposition suggests a relation between the learning of reading and phonological skills (6,17,19). Our results agree with studies that point to a relation between the development of specific skills for reading and phonological awareness, once it was verified in the results that the increase of skills in letter identification was proportional to the improvement of performance in phonological tasks of identification and discrimination of phonemes and performance in reading.…”

Implicit and explicit instruction of spelling rules

“…Moreover, none of these studies involved students with spelling disabilities. Although students with spelling disabilities benefit from explicit instruction (e.g., Bhattacharya & Ehri, 2004;Wanzek et al, 2006), it is not clear whether explicit instruction increases spelling performance in this group more so than implicit instruction. We therefore conducted two experiments in which the effects of implicit and explicit instruction of two different Dutch spelling rules in a mini-lesson are compared in both students with and without spelling disabilities.…”

An Examination of Commercial Spelling Programs for Upper Primary Level students

“…This reliance is believed to occur because of problems understanding and applying phonic principles, which is in turn often caused by an underlying weakness in phonemic awareness (Vukovic & Siegel, 2006). Thus poor spellers stand to benefit from an explicit, systematic program of instruction focusing on phoneme-grapheme and grapheme-morpheme analysis (Darch & Simpson, 1990;McNaughton et al, 1994;Wanzek et al, 2006), as has been argued previously.…”

“…Well-organised word lists assist children to take advantage of regularities in the language, and make connections between sound-and-letter and letter-and-meaning patterns so that they can better abstract rules and regularities from print and use this knowledge to produce accurate spellings (Steffler, 2001). Thus materials which do not organise words so as to highlight the stability of the specific features of the orthography, and which do not provide practice activities which help learners internalise these words and patterns, are far less effective than those that do (Darch, Kim, Johnson, & James, 2000;Morris et al, 1995;Wanzek et al, 2006).…”