12 Chapter 1 and spelling development builds upon this basis of representations (Shaywitz et al., 2003) as children become aware that the known words consist of speech sounds (phonological representation) that can be represented by graphemes (orthographic representation) and vice versa. This awareness of ‘phonemes’ is associated with a growing understanding of the alphabetical principle (Galuschka et al., 2014). In this phase of literacy development, children learn to recode graphemes into sounds in order to read (orthography-phonology connection) and to code phonemes into graphemes in order to spell (phonology-orthography connection). During this process, children recognize the meaning of words, which connects both phonology and orthography to the semantic representations. The more children practice the grapheme-sound correspondences, the faster the correct graphemes or sounds are retrieved from long-term memory, and decoding and coding words gets faster and more fluent. In addition, as a result of encountering printed or written words several times, children learn to read or write the whole word (or sometimes parts of words) accurately and instantly without decoding or recoding each grapheme. This process is also known as sight reading or spelling frommemory (Ehri, 2005a) and enables readers and spellers to become even more fluent. The graphemes or sounds are then immediately connected to semantic representations (see Pugh et al., 2013). Both decoding and coding as well as the sight word reading and spelling frommemory, stimulate high-quality bi-directional relationships between phonological and orthographic representations, which makes children proficient in both reading and spelling (see Ehri, 2005b; Perfetti & Hart, 2002). As can be seen throughout literacy development, reading and spelling are reversed processes, which could clarify why it has been shown in previous research among typically developing children that combining an emphasis on both reading and spelling can be beneficial for both learning to read and learning to spell (e.g., Conrad, 2008; De Graaff et al., 2009; Ehri, 2000; Ehri & Wilce, 1987; Ellis & Cataldo, 1990; Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000; Ise & Schulte-Körne, 2010; Ouellette & Sénéchal, 2008). Reading and spelling problems Despite the effort schools puts into learning children to read and spell, large individual differences occur in the extent to which children benefit from reading and spelling lessons. According to the lexical quality hypothesis, these differences in reading and spelling levels are mainly due to differences in the strength of the bi-directional relationship and the specificity of both phonological and orthographic representations (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). When the bi-directional relations are weaker, children may develop reading and spelling problems (Melby-Lervåg et al., 2012; Wimmer & Mayringer, 2002). This is especially the case for children with dyslexia, who read and spell at much lower levels than can be expected based on their age and educational level. Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is characterized by difficulties in reading and spelling
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw