Mastering spelling skills can be very demanding for pupils of primary education, especially for children with literacy learning difficulties. Despite regular practice in text composition at school, the demands of the task might lead to higher misspelling rates. On the other hand, the majority of the words, which pupils use in text composition tasks, might only be the ones that the authors would feel more confident to spell. This study investigates misspelling rates of pupils with and without dyslexia when writing to dictation in comparison to when composing their own texts. We hypothesise that the difficulties that pupils with dyslexia face with manipulating written language would decrease the amount of orthographically challenging words used in their texts and increase the misspelling rates in comparison to the texts produced by their non-dyslexic peers.

A second aim of this project is to examine the specific spelling patterns produced by pupils with and without dyslexia in two languages of different phonological transparency, English, a deep orthography and Greek, a relatively shallow orthographic system. Previous error analysis in Greek (Protopapas et al, 2013) has found that native speakers with dyslexia at the final years of primary school make comparable misspellings with their non-dyslexic peers. Previous research in the English language has investigated different aspects related to the spelling performance of children with dyslexia. Findings from different studies in English (Brown & Ellis, 1994; Nunes et al., 2006; Treiman, 1997) show that the spellings, which pupils find most difficult to spell, are the ones that are not phonologically transparent and are dependent on morphological (grammar, meaning) and orthographic knowledge (visual form). Previous studies in Greek (Bryant et al., 1999; Loizidou et al., 2010; Protopapas et al., 2013) have confirmed this notions. This study aims at examining comparable spelling items across these two orthographic systems to enable a more global investigation of spelling difficulties and dyslexia. It is expected to contribute to a deeper understanding of the development of literacy skills of pupils with specific learning difficulties, which would enable better designing of appropriate educational strategies for pupils' effective inclusion in the mainstream classroom. 

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