By Sarah Sainty, Assessment Consultant
Reading and spelling involve making connections between speech sounds (phonology), letters (orthography) and meaning (semantics). Success in literacy depends on efficient processing of information related to each of these areas – and the smooth integration of that information.
Analysing a person’s writing can help understand where there may be weak links and what kind of intervention might be useful. The below image shows the intriguing opening lines of a story written by Amy, aged 8.
Amy’s spelling shows strengths in her awareness of the sounds in words (phonological awareness) but insecurities in her knowledge of which letters and letter sequences should be mapped to those sounds. This is part of orthographic knowledge (which in its broadest sense can also be considered to include information about other written marks, such as punctuation, abbreviations and special symbols).
Although Amy passed her ‘phonics screening check’, and she knows which letter or letters can represent the 44 sounds or phonemes in English, she often chooses a letter combination that is not correct in that context, or a combination that is not permissible in English at all. For example, she knows that the sound /k/ can sometimes be represented by <ck>, and that this may occur at the end of a word, but her spelling of <asck> for ‘ask’ shows that she has not fully grasped the context in which this <ck> spelling occurs (after a short vowel) nor the fact that <ck> cannot follow <s> in English at all. Similarly, <Wy> captures the sounds in the word ‘why’ correctly, but this combination of letters does not occur in English. Amy does not have a reliable sense of when a word ‘looks right’, suggesting she has does not have an extensive bank of visual images of words in her mind, despite a lot of experience of reading. The ‘missing link’ in her literacy development is related to orthographic processing or ‘the ability to form and retrieve letters, letter sequences and spelling patterns’ (Holden, 2024).
Over the past few decades, the perception of dyslexia as a language-based disorder has become firmly established, leading to a focus on phonological processing (the ability to identify, manipulate, remember and quickly retrieve speech sounds). This is important in the earliest stages of learning to read and write, when children become consciously aware of the sounds in words and learn how letters can be mapped to them in a systematic way (phonics). It helps them to ‘decode’ letters to sounds to read, and ‘encode’ sounds to letters to spell. Proficient readers and writers, however, establish automatic connections between sounds and letters (orthographic mappings) so that decoding and encoding are not needed.
To make these automatic connections successfully and be skilled in orthographic processing, phonological awareness and phonics knowledge are not enough. While the pronunciation of English words has evolved over the centuries, aspects of spelling have often remained constant, meaning that words are not always spelt as they sound. Furthermore, many sounds can be represented in multiple ways, so that the correct choice in a specific word can only be made by having a mental image of that word from previous experience of it.
For some people, orthographic knowledge is acquired automatically, through repeated exposure to words when reading. Others need to be explicitly taught to recognise letter patterns, learn spelling conventions and memorise letter sequences. Understanding of etymology (word origins) and morphology (structure) can support the development of orthographic knowledge.
The ‘Delphi Definition’ of dyslexia that was introduced in the UK this year (Carroll et al, 2024), brought with it a new wave of interest in orthographic processing. Although phonological processing is identified within this definition as being the area of cognition in which difficulties most commonly lie in dyslexia, orthographic processing is also acknowledged as having an impact and it is stated that orthographic skills should be assessed.
These can be assessed informally through analysis of writing, but some new tools are also available for formal investigation: The Test of Orthographic Competence, Second Edition (TOC-2) and certain subtests of the Tests of Dyslexia (TOD). These are both available from Hogrefe and can be used to help identify challenges in orthographic processing that might previously have been overlooked, enabling the planning of effective intervention.
Carroll, J., Holden, C., Kirby, P., Snowling, M. J., & Thompson, P.A. (2024) forthcoming. Contemporary concepts of dyslexia: A Delphi study. https://osf.io/preprints/osf/tb8mp
Holden, C., Kirby, P., Snowling, M.J., Carroll, J., & Thompson, P.A. (2024) forthcoming. Towards a consensus for dyslexia practice: Findings of a Delphi study on assessment and identification. https://osf.io/preprints/edarxiv/g7m8n
