Dysorthography and grammar: the most common errors and how to work on them
Dysorthography does not only affect the lexical spelling of words — it also has a strong impact on written grammar. Certain grammatical errors are characteristic of this disorder and recur despite teaching. Identifying them makes it possible to adapt remediation and compensatory strategies more effectively.
Grammatical homophones: the great battle
Grammatical homophones — words that sound identical but are spelt differently depending on their function — are the most frequent source of errors in dysorthography. The most problematic pairs are: a/à (verb avoir vs preposition), et/est (conjunction vs verb être), on/ont (pronoun vs verb avoir), son/sont (determiner vs verb être), ou/où (conjunction vs adverb of place), ce/se (determiner vs reflexive pronoun). These confusions persist for a very long time despite repeated corrections, because they require an automated syntactic analysis that is not easily automated in dysorthography.
Agreement within the noun phrase
Gender and number agreement within the noun phrase — “les petites filles” vs “les petit filles” — poses significant difficulties. The dysorthographic child frequently forgets to make the determiner, adjective and noun agree with one another, or makes them agree inconsistently within the same phrase. These errors result from a difficulty in simultaneously holding in working memory all the information needed for agreement.
Subject-verb agreement
Agreement of the verb with its subject — particularly when the subject is distant from the verb or when the sentence is complex — generates many errors in dysorthography. “Les enfants qui jouent dans la cour courent” may become “Les enfants qui jouent dans la cour court” — the child agreeing with “la cour” rather than with “les enfants”.
Confused verb forms
Homophonous verb endings — “-er” (infinitive) vs “-é” (past participle) vs “-ez” (second person plural) — are sources of recurrent errors. Likewise, the forms of the imperfect and conditional, the endings of verbs in -oir/-oire, and irregular forms pose persistent difficulties.
How to work on these errors effectively
To work on recurrent grammatical errors, several approaches are effective. Explicit syntactic analysis — learning to identify the subject, the verb and their relationships before writing — helps gradually automate correct agreement. Personalised grammar aids-memoire — reference sheets with the most difficult rules — reduce the memory load during written production. And targeted proofreading — proofreading dedicated specifically to homophones, then another to agreements — is more effective than global proofreading. For resources on remediation of grammatical dysorthography, professionnelsdys.fr offers a directory of speech and language therapists specialising in this area.
