Dysorthography: complete guide for speech therapists
Dysorthography is a specific learning disorder of spelling. Often associated with dyslexia, it can also exist in isolation. It is characterized by persistent difficulties in spelling words correctly despite appropriate instruction. This guide presents the types of dysorthography, assessment and rehabilitation strategies.
✍️ Resources for dysorthography
Spelling exercises, visual rules, mnemonic strategies
Access the tools →📋 Table of Contents
What is dysorthography?
Dysorthography is a specific disorder of spelling acquisition, of neurobiological origin. It manifests itself through persistent difficulties in writing words correctly, in the absence of intellectual disability, sensory disorder or lack of instruction.
It is often associated with dyslexia (reading disorder), but can exist in isolation. When both disorders are present, it is called dyslexia-dysorthography.
Types of dysorthography
| Type | Affected mechanism | Typical errors |
|---|---|---|
| Phonological | Phoneme-grapheme conversion | Phonetically implausible errors: "boat" → "bot" |
| Surface | Orthographic lexicon | Errors on irregular words: "woman" → "wuman" |
| Mixed | Both routes | All types of errors |
Types of spelling errors
Phonological errors
- Omissions: "tree" → "tre"
- Additions: "leave" → "leaeve"
- Substitutions: "hat" → "bat"
- Reversals: "for" → "fro"
Usage/lexical errors
- Irregular words: "mister" → "miter"
- Homophones: "to/too", "there/their"
- Silent letters: "time" → "tim"
Grammatical errors
- Agreement: "the cats black"
- Conjugations: "they eats"
- Grammatical homophones: "and/end", "this/these"
Assessment
- Word dictation: regular, irregular, pseudowords
- Sentence/text dictation
- Spontaneous written production
- Qualitative analysis of errors
- Reading assessment (often associated)
- Phonological awareness
Speech therapy intervention
💡 Rehabilitation principles
- Target the type of dysorthography (phonological, surface, grammatical)
- Make explicit the rules and strategies
- Multi-sensory: see, hear, write, spell
- Repetition and automatization
- Metacognition: learning to proofread
Work areas
- Phonological awareness: segmentation, sound manipulation
- Phoneme-grapheme correspondences: systematic learning
- Orthographic lexicon: memorization of frequent and irregular words
- Spelling rules: explicit, with mnemonic devices
- Grammar: agreements, conjugations
- Proofreading strategies
School accommodations
- Additional time
- Computer with spell checker
- Non-penalization of spelling (except dictation)
- Adapted dictation: fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, reduced
- Oral assessment when possible
- Supports: memo cards, displayed rules
Our tools to download
🎶 Phonological awareness
Foundation of phonetic spelling.
Download📝 Visual spelling rules
Illustrated memos of main rules.
Download🔤 High-frequency word cards
Words to memorize globally.
Download✅ Proofreading grid
Checklist for self-correction.
DownloadFrequently asked questions
No, not always. Most dyslexics also have dysorthography (reading and writing share mechanisms). But dysorthography can exist without dyslexia: the person reads correctly but has difficulties writing. This is particularly the case when it is the lexical route (orthographic memory) that is affected.
The spell checker is a valuable help but is not sufficient. It doesn't correct everything (grammatical homophones, misspelled but existing words) and doesn't replace understanding of rules. Rehabilitation aims to improve spelling skills, and the spell checker is a complementary compensation tool.
✍️ Supporting dysorthography
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