Is there such a disorder as dysorthographia?
Very little research has been done on dysorthographia or specific learning disability in spelling. Besides, the term itself is not widely known or used in the literature of special education. Most of the time, such children severely poor in spelling are treated as dyslexic and are seldom or never grouped as dysorthographic to be intervened differently from others. Our main concern here is that we seriously need to know what exactly dysorthographia is.
The term dysorthographia begins with dys announces that the symptom, condition or state of being is dysfunctional or faulty. Orthography or orthographia refers to the correct or standard spelling in general. When dys is added to orthographia, dysorthographia becomes a term referring to a specific learning disability (SLD) associated with poor performance in spelling. It can be a developmental disorder which means it is of constitutional origin or it is an acquired disorder due to an external insult to the brain, characterized by a durable defect of assimilation of morphological and/or phonological rules resulting in the deterioration of the spontaneous written expression or under dictation. Bosse (2008) has identified a dysorthographic child as one who is unable to remember lexical spelling as a result of the core deficit in phonological processing, similar to children diagnosed with dyslexia. However, this phonological processing deficit cannot fully explain why there are children, who are able to read words using an analytic procedure, still unable to memorize their spelling.
Studies on children with SLD in spelling or dysorthographia have identified the following problems they encounter such as, slowness and poor performance in written expression with lots of hesitations (Tay, 2005); committing linguistic errors relating to grammar, conjugation and spelling (Funnell, 1992); writing difficulties similar to those relating to dyslexia (Bosse, 2008; Nicolson et al, 1992); errors in copying with arbitrary misspellings (Funnell, 1992; Sterling & Seed, 1992); and spelling errors due to additions, omissions, substitutions and reversals of letters and/or syllables (Chia, 1996).
Dysorthographia is neither an officially recognized term nor it is listed in either the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fourth Edition-Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) or the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Health-related Problems-Tenth Revision-Second Edition (ICD-10-2). However, the term can be found listed in the recently published Educator’s Diagnostic Manual of Disabilities and Disorders (EDM) under the disability category of learning disabilities: LD 5.00 (see EDM, p.31). This is the official manual of the American Academy of Special Education Professionals (AASEP). It has listed the following diagnostic symptoms of dysorthographia: “addition of unneeded letters, omission of needed letters, reversals of vowels, reversals of syllables, phonemic spelling of non-phonemic words, and/or difficulty in understanding the correspondence between sounds and letters” (p.31).
Currently, there are several studies being done on dysorthographia and hopefully, the findings of these studies can help us to understand the disorder better so that effective intervention strategies can be developed to help children with such a challenging issue.
Dr Noel K.H. Chia is a guest writer of this article at the special invitation of the LSESnet.com.
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