Two methods for teaching spelling to Greek dyslexic children are described. The
first method, termed PICTO (from the word 'pictographic'), involved the use of
pictograms (pictures of familiar objects): a number of phonically irregular letters (that is, letters where alternative representations of the same sound are possible) were turned into pictograms and superimposed on the irregular part of the written word. The second method, termed TRAD (from the word 'traditional'), was in effect a combination of traditional methods. It involved the traditional multisensory techniques commonly used in teaching spelling to English-speaking dyslexic children, along with methods derived from linguistics in which the children were taught the derivations of words and were shown how the same root morphemes, derivative morphemes, etc. were consistently represented by the same spelling pattern.
There were seventy-two participants in the study, aged between nine and eleven
years. Four different teachers, each using both PICTO and TRAD, took part in the
teaching sessions. Fifty words were selected for teaching purposes, all of which had been spelled incorrectly by all the children. Twenty-five words were assigned to SET A and twenty-five to SET B. Twenty four children were taught SET A by PICTO and SET B by TRAD; twenty-four other children were taught SET A by TRAD and SET B by PICTO. A further twenty four children received no instruction other than that given in the normal classroom. When the two groups of taught children were given a spelling test after 14 weeks at the end of the teaching period it was found that PICTO was very much more effective than TRAD; this result held up a month later, when it was also found that in the case of the words taught by PICTO there was less forgetting. The untreated group was also tested at this point, and it was found that they spelled fewer words correctly than either of the other two groups. Further analysis showed that age of teaching and gender had no effect on the results, and that the advantages of the
PICTO method were consistent across teachers. Issues arising out of these findings are briefly discussed.