The Effects of Visualizing and Verbalizing Methods in Remedial Spelling Training: Individual Changes in Dyslexic Students’ Spelling Test Performance

A remedial spelling training approach is presented which systematically combines certain visualizing and verbalizing methods to foster dyslexic students' orthographic knowledge and strategy use. It essentially depends upon an integrative application of algorithmic graphs and verbal self-instructions: Visualization and verbalization are intended to focus the students’ attention, cognitions, and behaviors on the algorithmic rule components for enhancing their task orientation and self-regulation skills. To that degree, the intervention must provide an intensive and consistent cognitive modeling phase as well as a broad range of special training materials which, in particular, are comprised of various algorithmic and self-instructional task formats. In the present replication study the temporal training effects on the spelling test performance of 9 students with severe spelling difficulties were evaluated. Achievement-related pre-test and follow-up data were analyzed after a treatment time of 40 hours. Empirical results could demonstrate individually and statistically significant gains in students’ general and error-specific spelling test performance – in both systematically trained and, to a somewhat lower degree, only incidentally considered spelling skill areas.