Lexical spelling in children and adolescents with specific language impairment: variations with the writing situation.
Story writing hides fewer spelling errors than dictation for kids with SLI, so check both before labeling them poor spellers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lucie and her team asked the kids with specific language impairment to spell the same words two ways. Half wrote a personal story that used the words. The other half wrote the words while an adult read them aloud.
The kids ranged from 8 to 15 years old. Each child did both tasks on different days. The researchers counted every spelling mistake.
What they found
Kids made fewer errors when they wrote stories than when they took dictation. The gap was large enough to move some children from the 'at-risk' range into the 'average' range.
Older kids with SLI spelled almost as well as their peers in stories. In dictation they lagged far behind.
How this fits with other research
Choi et al. (2012) warned us that mid-year spelling scores predict later failure in SLI. Lucie’s work adds a twist: the same child can look ‘fixed’ or ‘still at risk’ depending on how you test.
Lee et al. (2014) saw big writing gaps in Taiwanese kids with ADHD. Their dictation-only method may have overstated the deficit, just as Lucie shows for SLI.
Manor-Binyamini et al. (2021) found that kids with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome understand stories worse than they produce them. Lucie flips the pattern: SLI kids produce better spelling inside stories than outside them.
Why it matters
If you test spelling only through dictation, you may place SLI learners in interventions they do not need. Try a quick story-writing probe first. Use the dictation data as a secondary measure. This small change can keep caseloads lean and keep kids in general-education writing activities where they show real strength.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The goal of this study was to compare the lexical spelling performance of children and adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) in two contrasting writing situations: a dictation of isolated words (a classic evaluative situation) and a narrative of a personal event (a communicative situation). Twenty-four children with SLI and 48 typically developing children participated in the study, split into two age groups: 7-11 and 12-18 years of age. Although participants with SLI made more spelling errors per word than typically developing participants of the same chronological age, there was a smaller difference between the two groups in the narratives than in the dictations. Two of the findings are particularly noteworthy: (1) Between 12 and 18 years of age, in communicative narration, the number of spelling errors of the SLI group was not different from that of the typically developing group. (2) In communicative narration, the participants with SLI did not make specific spelling errors (phonologically unacceptable), contrary to what was shown in the dictation. From an educational perspective or that of a remediation program, it must be stressed that the communicative narration provides children-and especially adolescents-with SLI an opportunity to demonstrate their improved lexical spelling abilities. Furthermore, the results encourage long-term lexical spelling education, as adolescents with SLI continue to show improvement between 12 and 18 years of age.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.06.025