Teaching L2 Spelling

unpublished circa 1999

Abstract
This paper suggests that spelling has been unduly neglected in the teaching of
English. It analyses a corpus of students’ spelling mistakes in terms of problems
common to many students, such as the spelling of idiosyncratic single words and
pronunciation-based problems, and problems with sound/ letter correspondences
for vowels, consonants, consonant doubling, <i>/<y> alternation, sound-based
mistakes and transposition of letters. It sketches typical problems of students with
eleven first languages. It argues that the teaching of spelling should rely partly on
checking a set of frequent mistakes as one-off items, partly on explanations of
spelling rules for sound/letter relationships and for letter combinations and
position, partly on drilling of particular aspects such as doubling.

Note some phonetic symbols will appear odd unless you have Ecological
Linguistics IPA font.

Spelling has been almost completely ignored in teaching methodology, in course-

books and in research into second language learning. In so far as anybody thinks
about it at all, spelling is dismissed as one of those inevitable problems about
English, like the weather: oh dear, English spelling is terrible and we need to grit
our teeth and bear it. Yet, beyond a certain stage, perhaps the majority of
student’s mistakes in written English are to do with spelling. Spelling mistakes
are often felt to be a sign of lack of education; while accent and grammar can be
excused, spelling mistakes can be unforgivable. Leaving the teaching of spelling
to haphazard correction cannot be in the students’ best interests.

This paper looks at 1498 mistakes from L2 students of English, collected from
ten-line samples of the writing of 375 students with diverse first languages doing
an entry test for an English university, described in Cook (1997), and amplified
from the Longman Corpus of Learner English to get at least 100 errors from
eleven groups with different L1s, typically taken from 30 or so additional pieces
of student work, namely: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Urdu.
 The writing systems of the world either use large numbers of individual
characters corresponding to meanings, as in Chinese or make use of a small
number of letters corresponding to sounds, as in English. This division is echoed
within the individual person. A user of English has both a store of visual
examples of high frequency words (Seidenberg, 1985) and a complex set of rules
for relating sounds and letters. The word the is processed as a visual sign <the>,
not as three separate letters <t>, <h> and <e>; the word pen is, however,
processed by applying the rules for how the letter <p> corresponds to /p/, <e> to
/e/, and so on (angle brackets are used to refer to letters <b> just as slant brackets
are used for phonemes /b/). English is famous for the number of one-off
exceptions that have to be stored as individual items, such as yacht
or of.

A. Problems for many learners

Some problems afflict many students virtually regardless of their first language.

1. Single words

Because English relies on a store of individual words, students need to learn

some words as one-off items. Indeed L2 users of English performed better at
irregular high-frequency words than at regular low-frequency words (Brown,
1970). One way of establishing which words these are is to compare the
frequency lists for English supplied by the British National Corpus (BNC) with
the mistakes found in our corpus. The following 21 words appear both in the top
200 BNC words and more than once in our corpus: because, can (neg), could
(neg), different, from, government, have, life, people, really, said, their, think, to,
too, very, where, which, will, would, you.

A second way is to list the words that are most often misspelt by L2 users. 27
words are misspelt more than five times, including five from the first
list: accommodating, because, beginning, business, career, choice, definite,
develop, different, describe, government, interest(ing), integrate, kindergarten,
knowledge, life, necessary, particular, professional, professor, really,
study/student, their, which, would. Some of these words have many alternative
 misspellings; because for example is spelt as beause, beaucause, becase, becaus,
becouse, becuase, becuse and begause.

Together these two lists show crucial errors that students need to guard against.
Learning these 43 words as individual spellings in itself goes some way towards
curing the students’ most common mistakes. Many also occur among native
speakers, for example definite, different, government, their, where. Teachers can
protect the students by checking that they know the spelling of these words and
by teaching them those that they get wrong.

2. Pronunciation-based problems

Unlike native speakers, students may not know the actual sound system of
English, and so will appear to use the wrong letters. Two main areas are:

 confusing English sounds, in particular /e/ and /i/ as in beg (big), endiveduoly,
fredges

 adding vowels after final consonants and in between consonant clusters. Spoken
English has not only Consonant-Vowel (CV) syllables as in who /hu:/ but also
final consonants in CVC one /wŠ n/ and clusters of more than one consonant, say
CCVCC grasp /gr‡ :sp/. Students with L1s without final consonants or clusters of
more than one consonant often pad out the structure with an ‘epenthentic’ vowel
(Broselow, 1983), leading to extra vowels in spelling such as addrese, courese,
adovocated and subejects.

Pronunciation practice is going to be more rewarding with these problems than

practice in spelling, not only the contrast between phonemes but also the
structure of the English syllable.

3 Spelling-correspondence problems

The most difficult aspects of English spelling for many students are the complex
correspondences between sounds and letters. In ‘shallow’ writing systems such as
Spanish, the relationship is close to one letter to one sound; in ‘deep’ systems
such as Chinese there are minimal links between character and pronunciation.
 English is far from shallow, a full account of its spelling taking 535 pages in
Carney (1994).

To give an overall idea, the pie-chart below gives the proportions of mistakes
found in the various categories to be discussed. These categories are
straightforward adaptations of the traditional types used in the spelling literature,
for example Brooks, Gorman & Kendall (1993) for L1 children and Bebout
(1985) for L2 adults. The majority of mistakes, 59%, consist of the omission and
addition of vowels and consonants, substitution coming second with 30%.

(i) Vowels

 choosing between <a>, <e> and <i> in word endings with <an>/<en> frequantly,
relevent, appearence, importent; with <el>/<al>/<il> hostal, leval, fossal; and
with <ate> definately, definetely.
 deciding whether to use <e> or <i> to correspond to /’ / devided, dicided.

 knowing which written vowel corresponds to schwa /‘ / activeties,

grammer. Since many unstressed vowels are pronounced as /‘ /, the spellings
 have to be remembered as one-off items, equally difficult for native speakers as
seen in destinct and divice (Author, 1997).

 wrongly omitting vowels, particularly <e> when absent from the spoken form in
the middle of words intresting or ‘silent’ <e>s joks, and in the combination
<ie> belive.

(ii) Consonants

 choosing between the three consonants <s>, <c> and <t> recognice, tradisional,
spetial, particularly in words with Latinate endings.

 interchanging <m> and <n> confortable, amd (and).

 omitting consonants, particularly <c> before <t> or <k> charater, chiken, <h> in
<wh> what and <ch> psycology, the ‘silent’ <r> of British English before
consonants coner, <s> oberved, and <n> in words such as crimial,
eough, surprisingly 11.7% of total consonant omissions.
 inserting extra consonants, particularly <t> with <gh> enought, <r> Tuersday and
initial <h> hability, in the latter case overlapping with pronunciation problems
for /h/-less L1s.

(iii) Consonant doubling

One common mistake is the doubling of consonants, amounting to 14.4% of all

mistakes and 43.3% of mistakes with consonant addition or omission. In English
writing, unlike languages such as Spanish, single and double consonants do not
correspond to different sounds but follow complex orthographic rules: doubling
occurs after primary-stressed short vowels full unless they are more than two
syllables from the end celery, before <le> little, in some Latinate words with a
prefix command, and in several other ways (Carney, 1994). Mistakes consist
equally of adding an unnecessary double consonant (48.3%) and omitting a
necessary second consonant (51.7%). Some may be due to pronunciation
problems when students do not know whether a vowel is short or long.
 <l>< Problems include: omission or addition of one <l> as
in excelent and allarm; <ly> endings where <l> either gets left out generaly or an
extra <l> gets added largelly; unnecessary doubling in endings in
<ful> beautifull, also found in other words ending in single <l> with short
stressed vowels such as tel and < wil.

 <r> < Unnecessary doubling of <r> occurs mostly between vowels as in verry,
tirred; lack of doubling is found on stressed verb-stem endings in
<er>/<ur> occured, transfering and the ubiquitous < refered.

 < m> < The most common mistake is the loss of <m> in accomodation; some
words in <comm> lose an <m> comercial and some in <com> gain an <m> <
comming.

 <t> < Medial <t> is often wrongly doubled universitty or left single < atention,
hoter.

 <s> < Final <ss> often becomes <s> adres, medial <s> becomes <s> <
dissapoint.

(iv) <i>/<y> alternation

The use of <y> as a final letter corresponding to /’ / causes confusion, leading

both to its omission studing and to the failure to change <y> to <ie> before
<s> implys. Other problems include <y> for /’ /in some Greek-derived
words analise, <y> as part of <ay> alwais or <oy> joyning, and past tenses in
<aid> payed, again familiar from native speakers.

(v) Sound-based

Students may spell accurately according to the sound but produce the wrong
combination of letters for a particular word, some 5.6% of all mistakes. The
commonest is the use of <dge> for /d½ / colledge but there are also frequent
spellings of <ee> for /i:/ feever and <er> for schwa /‘ / nerses. An extreme
example is higher archary (hierarchy). This also includes confusion between
words that are either homophones such as there/their/they’re and passed/past or
near-homophones quiet/quite.
 (vi) Transposition

Transposition of letters comes to 4.9% of all mistakes. In consonants the worst

offenders are digraphs such as <th> strenght and <tc> Ducth, in vowels
<ie> freinds and <ei> thier. Some consonant vowel pairs also alternate,
particularly <ce> patienec, <le> handels and <or> from (form).

Throughout this section L2 users’ mistakes are not very different from those of
native speakers. Most of the spelling mistakes mentioned here can for instance be
duplicated in the manuscript of Wordsworth’s Prelude (Parrish, 1977), whether
incorrect doubling vullgar, addition of vowels anixious or omission of
consonants taugh (taught).

B. Problems for speakers of specific L1s

Nevertheless some problems are clearly caused by the students’ L1 sound or

writing systems. Previous accounts of some L1 groups can be found for Spanish
(Bebout, 1985), Arabic (Ibrahim, 1978), and Welsh (James, Scholfield, Garrett,
& Griffiths, 1993).

 Arabic. Arabic problems mostly concern pronunciation, seen in the high

proportion of substituted vowels obundant, additional ‘epenthetic’
vowels punishement and phonological mistakes manshed (mentioned). Only
Arabic speakers substitute <c> for <q> cuickly

 Chinese. Characteristic Chinese mistakes are the omission of

consonants subjet and the addition of <e> boyes.

 Dutch. Dutch speakers have no distinctive mistakes apart from double

<kk>wekk.

 French. < French speakers wrongly double consonants comming and substitute
vowels materiel.
 German. < The omission of <e> is typical happend, as is the substitution of <i>
for <e> injoid. A unique mistake is telephon.
 Greek.< Greeks substitute consonants, particularly <d>/<t> Grade Britain,
double unnecessarily sattisfaction and transpose sceince. A unique mistake is <c>
for <g> Creek (Greek).

 Italian.< Italian students particularly omit consonants as in wether (whether) and

fail to double < biger.

 Japanese.< Consonant substitution is common gramatikal, as are the addition of

epenthetic vowels difficulity and CV transposition prospretiy. The distinctive
Japanese mistake is the exchange of <l> and <r> grobal, most obviously derived
from the pronunciation difficulty with /l/ and /r/ but also related to the
transliteration of Japanese words into romaji, the roman alphabet system used in
Japan.

 Korean.< Consonant omission looms large fators, as do lack of

doubling poluted and omitted vowels < therefor.

 Spanish.< Consonant omission is common wich, as is both lack of

doubling til and unnecessary doubling exclussive.

 Urdu.< The typical mistake is leaving out vowels somtimes and consonants,
particularly final <d> and <t> lef, woul.

C. Teaching Spelling

What can teachers do about the mistakes seen here? At the moment there is little
choice of teaching materials specifically for spelling. The only available L2 title
seems to be Digby & Myers (1993), Making Sense of Spelling and
Pronunciation, though there are several L1 titles that cover some of the same
ground such as Parker (1994) Test Your Spelling and Davis (1985) Handling
Spelling. None of them cover the range of mistakes outlined here, mostly
concentrating on sound/letter correspondences, homophones or ‘silent’ letters.

One approach is to explain the rules to students, say an outline of the main
correspondences for consonant doubling, or to get them to read an accessible
account of English spelling such as Carney (1997). Such explanations need to be
based on detailed descriptions such as Carney (1994) rather than on the
traditional folk explanations often offered in primary-school classrooms such as
"Magic e waves its wand to make the vowel say its name". Even if such
explanations benefit some students, they may confuse others who do not need
them.

A second approach is to check that students can spell the particular words that
give most problems, whether in general or for their specific group, say definitely,
careful, occurred and will. This means treating them as one-off instances to be
learnt by rote rather than general rules. The set of 45 items given above can
provide a basis for this.

Thirdly specific drilling practice can be given on particular rules, say the change
of <y> to <ie> before <s> carries, so that troublesome groups of words or word-
endings can be tackled. A common L1 approach is to take particular affixes that
give problems, say the <e>/<i> choice in prefixes <de> decide or the suffixes
<ly> and <ful> truly, careful. One difficulty is that many of the rules of English
rely on a difference between what Albrow (1972) calls the ‘basic’ system as
in back, the Romance system baroque, and the exotic system amok. While it may
be educationally useful for native children to appreciate the diverse origins of
English vocabulary, this is an unnecessary extra burden for most L2 students.

An argument against teaching spelling is the wide-spread use of spelling checkers

within word-processing programs such as Word; do students actually need to
know the right spelling when the computer will find it for them? Spelling
checkers, however, create problems of their own since they accept any spelling
that corresponds to an English word even if it is not appropriate in context; a
familiar example is letter transposition, form/from or sue/use. The advantage is
that spelling checkers can be set to trap the writer’s own typical mistakes; for this
reason an article such as this which deliberately includes wrong spelling is very
hard to check. The help that checkers provide is limited for non-native users who
may not be able to decide between the alternatives presented. They are also
unavailable in circumstances when students precisely need to demonstrate their
knowledge of English, such as filling in forms and writing examination answers.
They do, however, provide a new teaching exercise in which the student are
asked to correct written texts with various common mistakes, say some of those
above, and to check how the computer handles them.

Above all teachers and students should be encouraged to see some of the merits
of the English spelling system, so obvious that they are never stated and yet so
basic that both students and native speakers rarely make mistakes with them. One
example is the cunning eighteenth century invention of spelling a morpheme in
the same way regardless of its different pronunciations, as in the use of <ed> for
regular past tense despite its three pronunciations /id/, /t/, and /d/. A second
example is the convention that only grammatical items may be spelt with two or
less letters, thus contrasting I/aye, to/two, an/Ann, and many others. A third
example is the convention for English surnames to have either a double
consonant or a final <e> when they are homophones of
nouns, Hogg/hog and Rowe/row. English spelling is a complex and sophisticated
system that has far more to it than the correspondence of letters and sounds.
Teachers and students may be helped if they understand some of the systematic
elements in English spelling. Teaching spelling can contribute as much to the
students’ ability to use English as the teaching of pronunciation at a far less cost
in time.

References
Albrow, K.H.< 1972. The English Writing System: notes towards a description.
London: Longman.
Bebout, L.1985. ‘An error analysis of misspellings made by learners of English
as a first and as a second language’. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 14/6:
569-593.
Brooks, G., Gorman, T. & Kendall, L. 1993. Spelling It Out: the spelling abilities
of 11- and 15-year-olds. Slough: NFER
Broselow, E.1983. ‘Non-obvious transfer: On predicting epenthesis errors’ in:: S.
Gass and Selinker, L. (eds.). Language Transfer in Language Learning. Rowley,
Mass.: Newbury House. 269-280
Brown, H D. 1970. ‘Categories of spelling difficulty in speakers of English as a
first and second language.’ Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 9:
232-236
Carney, E. 1994. A Survey of English Spelling. London: Routledge
Carney, E. 1997. English Spelling. London: Routledge
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Davis, J.1985. Handling Spelling. Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes
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Hempstead: Prentice-Hall
Ibrahim, M. 1978. ‘Patterns in spelling errors’. ELT 32: 207-12
James, C., Scholfield, P., Garrett, P. & Griffiths, Y. 1993. ‘Welsh bilinguals’
spelling: an Error Analysis’. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural
Development 14/4: 287-306
Parker, V. 1994. Test Your Spelling. London: Usborne
Parrish, S.(ed.). 1977. The Prelude, 1798-1799 by William Wordsworth. Cornell
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writing systems.’ Cognition 19: 1-30