Beyond Spelling: Oral and Written Expository Discourse Skills in Adolescents With Dyslexia

Students with dyslexia may produce shorter written texts with poorer content and less complex language than peers, but it remains unclear whether such differences reflect increased writing effort associated with dyslexia or co-occurring non-phonological language difficulties. Therefore, this study compared oral and written discourse skills in Swedish adolescents (11-16 years old) with dyslexia (n = 16) and typical development (n = 37). Each participant explained a sport or game of their choice-first orally and, on a later occasion, in writing. Samples were analysed for productivity, syntactic complexity, linguistic and spelling accuracy and content. No significant group differences were found in either task apart from spelling. Across groups oral samples had higher linguistic accuracy, more words and more content than written samples. The results indicate that the spelling and decoding abilities that characterise dyslexia are not associated with poorer content, productivity, complexity or accuracy of written or oral samples and highlight the importance of a thorough oral language evaluation when students present with written language difficulties beyond spelling. Future studies should compare discourse skills in adolescents with dyslexia only, dyslexia with co-occurring developmental language disorder/DLD and DLD only, to further investigate the role of non-phonological language skills in oral and written discourse production.