Investigating the effect of dyslexia on writing disabilities in spelling lessons and its relationship with phonological awareness

Reading and writing disorders cause many problems for people and affect their future. Therefore, timely identification of each of these disorders can prevent many negative consequences in individuals, family, and social life of these people, which requires accurate knowledge of the factors affecting the development of these disorders. This paper aimed to investigate the effect of phonological awareness and reading disorders on students’ writing disabilities in spelling lessons. The research type was causal-comparative method. The population of this study included all girl and boy students in the second and third grades of an elementary school in Isfahan city of Iran in the academic year 2019-2020. A sample of 80 were selected and studied in two groups of normal and dyslexic. Phonological awareness tests and spelling tests were used to collect data. The obtained data were analyzed at both descriptive and inferential levels using independent t-test and Pearson correlation coefficient. Findings showed that misspellings of dyslexic students are higher than normal students. The study of three components, phonological awareness, reading disorder, and misspellings, showed that weakness in phonological awareness tests leads to reading disorders. As a result, it increases misspellings. This study also showed that among the three components of phonological awareness, including phonological awareness, Syllable awareness, and intra-Syllable awareness, misspellings are inversely related to phonological awareness but have no significant relationship with the other two components.