Understanding the complex challenges of spelling in children with dyslexia

Children with dyslexia often show improvement in reading but struggle with spelling due to overlapping cognitive skills such as phonological processing, memory, and visual word recognition. Tailored, explicit instruction alongside supportive tools can help bridge the gap and improve written communication.

For many parents, one of the most baffling parts of dyslexia is seeing reading improve while spelling remains stubbornly weak. A child may read a word correctly in one moment and misspell it minutes later. That gap is not unusual. Spelling asks the brain to do something different from reading: not just recognise a word, but rebuild it from sounds, memory and pattern knowledge.

The first reason spelling can be so hard is that it depends on several skills working at once. A child has to hear the sounds in a word, keep them in order, choose the right letters or letter groups, remember any irregular parts and then write the whole word down. Research on spelling and memory suggests that weak phonological processing, working memory and long-term storage of word forms can each contribute to different kinds of spelling errors. In other words, the problem is not always one thing; it can be a cluster of overlapping difficulties.

That helps explain why some children with dyslexia spell a word correctly one day and incorrectly the next. A study published on PMC distinguishes between orthographic long-term memory, which stores familiar written word patterns, and the graphemic buffer, the working-memory system that holds letters in place while a word is being written. If either system is fragile, spelling can become inconsistent, especially when a word is unfamiliar, irregular or longer than the child can comfortably hold in mind.

English itself can make the task even more confusing. Spelling is not purely about sound. It also reflects patterns, meaning, word parts and history. That is why a word such as “sign” makes more sense when seen alongside “signal” and “signature”. A report from the Dyslexia Training Institute argues that some children struggle less with phonological awareness than with storing the visual form of words, especially words that do not follow straightforward sound-to-letter rules. For older learners, understanding morphology, the study of meaningful word parts such as roots, prefixes and suffixes, can make spelling feel far more logical.

The trouble is that memorising word lists rarely builds durable spelling skill on its own. Children may learn words for a test and then lose them again in everyday writing. Structured instruction works better when it is explicit, systematic and cumulative, with repeated practice in patterns, rules, syllable types and word families. Dictation can also help because it forces a child to hold a sentence or word in mind, apply what has been taught and write it in context. Research on students with decoding and spelling difficulties shows that phonological weaknesses can also hinder the development of orthographic representations, making this kind of direct teaching especially important.

Writing adds another layer of strain. When a child is composing a sentence or paragraph, spelling competes with planning, grammar, punctuation, handwriting and task directions. That is why a word may be spelled correctly in a lesson but missed later in a composition. A review in PMC links dyslexia with wider writing difficulties, including spelling and handwriting, while other research points to inefficiencies in working-memory systems involved in letter naming and reversals. In practice, that means spelling weakness may be only one part of a broader written-language challenge.

For families, the answer is usually not to give up on spelling instruction, but to pair it with sensible support. Spellcheck, predictive text, speech-to-text, typing, word banks and personal spelling dictionaries can keep a child’s ideas from being blocked by weak spelling. Research on orthographic depth also suggests that learners do not all struggle in exactly the same way, which is one reason tailored teaching matters. The goal is not perfect spelling at all costs. It is helping a child communicate clearly while building the skills that spelling still demands over time.