Learning Disabilities and Spelling

Learning-disabled students often have more severe deficits in spelling than in reading. In reading, context and other cues help one to decode a word, but in spelling, one must produce the word after hearing or thinking it. As a consequence of their difficulties with spelling, LD students find writing tasks both laborious and aversive.

There is usually just one correct way to spell any particular word with a given meaning (homonyms — words that sound alike but are spelled differently, such as here and hear — have different meanings; and some words have “British” and “American” spellings — behaviour and behavior). Thus spelling does not allow any room for “creative” answers or “style”; a word is either spelled correctly or it is misspelled.