Sound Isn’t Enough: A Dyslexia-Friendly Spelling Tip

A strange irony about dyslexia is that it’s usually related to a phonological deficit, and yet dyslexic kids are often the ones who over-rely on phonology for spelling (and so produce spellings like “jumpt”). For these kids, and particularly those who also aren’t strong orthographic processors (these are the kids who can read and write a word a dozen times in a sitting and then spell it incorrectly three minutes later), helping them to think morphologically is a vital skill, to ‘break out’ of their over-reliance on how a word sounds.

These kids need to be encouraged into the habit of thinking about what a word means… is it a base word plus an affix (like “hissed”), or is it just a baseword in itself (like “fist”)?  The often misspelt “does” is just the base word “do” plus the suffix “es” (just like munch + es = munches).