The ability to spell is a gradually developing, long, and complex process. It is directly linked to language skills, phonological, grammatical, and semantic awareness, cognitive functions (intelligence, perception, and memory), and metacognitive skills (Diamanti et al., 2014). Spelling ability is documented as a composite skill that is rather laborious to acquire and which is an essential part of writing (Oakley & Fellowes, 2016)

Some children experience great difficulty as compared to their peers in learning to spell; these children typically have difficulty learning to read as well. It is important to have a good understanding of these complexities in order to comprehend how children learn to spell and why some children have severe difficulties with this process. Theories about how children learn to spell need to account for the full spectrum of patterns, as do theories about why some children have difficulty in spelling and how we can assist them(Treiman, 2017b, 2017a).

The correlation between intelligence, language problems, and spelling is well established in research (Smith et al., 2016) and demonstrates that general intelligence and phonological awareness contribute to the acquisition of reading and spelling skills in children (Siddaiah & Padakannaya, 2015; Zarić et al., 2021).

Research findings suggest that there may be other unknown environmental factors contributing to spelling, such as family environment, neighborhood school, print exposure, environmental toxins, nutrition, the number of siblings, experiences such as visits to the library, and the number of books in the home(Lewis et al., 2018).

This study explores the correlation between students’ performance on a spelling test and specific socio-demographic characteristics, such as gender, father’s and mother’s occupation, who helps them with homework, the degree of satisfaction with their school performance, their parents’ degree of satisfaction with their school performance, difficulties they face in school subjects (reading, writing, arithmetic), essays, tests (oral and written), and use of leisure time.

Research in Greece investigating the development of spelling ability in individuals with and without LD seems limited; however, in recent years in Greece, there has been interest in the linguistic factors related to the development of spelling ability as well as in the analysis of spelling errors of students with and without LD (Protopapas et al., 2013)

In particular, the research hypotheses were:

Η₁: The gender of students with spelling difficulties will correlate with their spelling performance.

Η₂: Parents’ occupation (father and mother) will correlate with spelling performance.

Η₃: The satisfaction of children with spelling difficulties with their school progress will correlate with their spelling performance.

Η₄: Perceived parents’ satisfaction with school progress will correlate with their spelling performance.

 Η₅: Children’s perceived difficulties in school subjects (dictation, reading, writing, arithmetic), essay writing, and oral or written assessments (tests) will correlate with performance in spelling.

Η₆: The use of free time will correlate with performance.

The study presents the pilot findings of a large-scale survey. Participants The sample consisted of 225 children: 111 (49.3%) boys and 114 (50.7%) girls. The average age of the children in the sample is 11.5 years, with the average age of boys being only two months older than girls. All the children attended the 6th grade of the primary school on the island of Rhodes: 50.2% of them attended school in the city of Rhodes, and 49.8% attended school in the semi-urban and rural areas. Instruments The following instruments were utilised to collect data for the study: 1) A self-report of two sections, to obtain socio-demographic data and family characteristics. 2) The DWT is a passage-spelling test. It is an age-appropriate passage with morphological variety developed by Zachos and Zachos in 1998 (Zachos & Zachos, 1998).. Procedure and data analysis Data collection took place in the school years 2017–20. The questionnaires were administered to the students by their teacher. Data analysis was based on descriptive statistics and the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests for independent samples.

The study showed that there was a correlation between students’ performance on the spelling test and the demographic variables: gender, mother’s occupation, reading help, children’s satisfaction with school performance, parents’ satisfaction with school performance, reading difficulties, spelling difficulties, essay difficulties, arithmetic difficulties, oral difficulties, writing difficulties, and leisure time use. Especially, the study indicated that most students scored high in spelling errors. Moreover, the study revealed statistically significant differences between children’s spelling performance in the DWT test and the following demographic variables: Gender, mother’s occupation, reading assistance, children’s satisfaction with school performance, parents’ satisfaction with school performance, reading difficulties, spelling difficulties, exposure difficulties, arithmetic difficulties, oral difficulties, writing difficulties, and leisure time utilisation. Students who had a tutor at home or another person for help made more spelling errors compared to students who had no help. Children who were dissatisfied with their own or their parents’ performance in school made a higher number of spelling mistakes. At the same time, children who reported having difficulties (a few to too many) in reading, spelling, composition, arithmetic, speaking, and writing made more spelling errors. Finally, students who stated that they go to their country house in their free time and students with fewer extracurricular activities made more spelling mistakes. The present study shows that certain socio-demographic characteristics are correlated with students’ spelling attainment. These findings emphasise both that children’s spelling ability is a complex process involving a variety of factors and that each student should be considered individually. In conclusion, the research highlights the need to consider socio-demographic factors in terms of teaching, educational reforms, and changes in issues of spelling: learning and dealing with spelling difficulties.

Diamanti, V., Goulandris, N., Stuart, M., & Campbell, R. (2014). Spelling of derivational and inflectional suffixes by Greek-speaking children with and without dyslexia. Reading and Writing, 27(2), 337–358. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-013-9447-2 Oakley, G., & Fellowes, J. (2016). A closer look at spelling in the primary classroom. Primary English Teachers Association Australia. Siddaiah, A., & Padakannaya, P. (2015). Rapid automatized naming and reading: A review. Psychological Studies, 60(1), 70–76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-014-0280-8 Smith, B. L., Smith, T. D., Taylor, L., & Hobby, M. (2016). Relationship between Intelligence and Vocabulary: Perceptual and Motor Skills. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.100.1.101-108 Treiman, R. (2017a). Learning to spell: Phonology and beyond. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 34(3–4), Article 3–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2017.1337630 Treiman, R. (2017b). Learning to spell words: Findings, theories, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 21(4), 265–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2017.1296449