Spelling improvement through letter-sound and whole-word training in two multilingual Greek- and English- speaking children

Case studies of two children with spelling difficulty are reported. LK was multilingual and ED bilingual. A training programme that targeted phonic decoding (or sublexical) spelling processes was conducted with both children. Immediate and delayed post-training assessments showed improvement in spelling nonwords for LK but not for ED. Training that targeted whole word (or lexical) spelling processes was then conducted with ED. Improvement in spelling of irregular words (a marker for lexical spelling processes) was observed. Research into literacy difficulties with multilingual children is sparse, although multilingualism is increasingly widespread. Up to now theoretically based training studies have focused on monolingual children and results were promising. The present findings indicate that theoretically based training programmes for literacy difficulties can also be effective for multilingual children.