English Reading and Spelling Characteristics of Korean Children with Developmental Dyslexia in Grades 3-4

Objectives: This study examined differences in English word decoding, spelling, and phonological processing between typically developing (TD) children and children with developmental dyslexia (DD) in Grades 3 and 4. Methods: Participants were 23 typically developing students and 14 students with developmental dyslexia. English assessment tasks were adapted from Kim and Pae (2024) and revised for this study. Results: Children in the DD group showed significantly lower performance than the TD group across all English word decoding and grapheme knowledge tasks. A significant group-by-task interaction indicated that the largest performance gap appeared in grapheme-sound awareness, compared with grapheme naming and grapheme identification. The TD group also outperformed the DD group in English spelling. In phonological awareness, significant group differences were observed in phoneme awareness at both the word and Consonant Vowel (CV)-syllable levels. Across phonological awareness tasks, accuracy was lower on deletion tasks than on blending tasks, indicating that deletion placed greater demands on phonological processing. In rapid automatized naming, no group difference emerged for digits, whereas the DD group performed significantly lower only on grapheme naming. In phonological memory, a significant group difference was found solely in the three-syllable repetition task. All variables except phonological memory showed significant correlations with English word decoding, and grapheme knowledge demonstrated the strongest associations with both decoding and spelling. Conclusion: Findings indicate that Korean children with developmental dyslexia are likely to experience broad difficulties in English decoding, spelling, and phonological processing. These results highlight the need for early and targeted English literacy support for children at risk for dyslexia.