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Bilingual spelling patterns in middle

school: it is more than transfer
a a b
Ruth Huntley Bahr , Elaine R. Silliman , Robin L. Danzak & Louise
c
C. Wilkinson
a
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders,
University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA
b
Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Sacred Heart
University, Trumbull, CT, USA
c
School of Education, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
Published online: 28 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Ruth Huntley Bahr, Elaine R. Silliman, Robin L. Danzak & Louise C. Wilkinson ,
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (2014): Bilingual spelling patterns
in middle school: it is more than transfer, International Journal of Bilingual Education and
Bilingualism, DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2013.878304
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 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2013.878304

Bilingual spelling patterns in middle school: it is more than transfer

Ruth Huntley Bahra*, Elaine R. Sillimana, Robin L. Danzakb and Louise C. Wilkinsonc
a
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL,
USA; bDepartment of Speech-Language Pathology, Sacred Heart University, Trumbull, CT, USA;
Downloaded by [Sacred Heart University], [Robin Danzak] at 12:02 31 January 2014

c
School of Education, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
(Received 11 February 2013; accepted 18 December 2013)

This study examined the Spanish and English spelling patterns of bilingual
adolescents, including the cross-linguistic effects of each language, by applying a
fine-grained measure to the differences in spelling in naturalistic writing. Spelling
errors were taken from narrative and expository writing samples provided by 20
Spanish–English bilingual adolescents (n = 160). Errors were coded by categories
(phonological, orthographic, and morphological) and specific linguistic features
affected and then analyzed by language and genre. Descriptive analyses noted
similarities and differences among error patterns in both languages as well as
language transfer (i.e., borrowings and code-switching). Statistical analyses revealed
language differences in proportions of misspellings across linguistic categories.
More fine-grained analyses indicated linguistic feature patterns that were shared
across languages and unique to each language. Finally, borrowing, while infrequent,
was noted more frequently in English compositions. This investigation appears to
demonstrate that spelling, when approached as both a cognitive and linguistic
activity, is complex since multiple knowledge systems must be coordinated. The use
of triple word form theory to analyze misspellings in emerging bilingual writers
suggests that discerning patterns of misspellings in each language provides more
insight than does transfer alone into the extent that phonology, orthography, and
morphology are becoming unified.
Keywords: bilingual spelling; bilingual writing; triple word form theory; code-switching;
language transfer; translanguaging

Introduction
For the first time, the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association,
Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA, CCSSO] 2010)
stress writing as an essential tool for learning within and across content areas (Graham,
Gillespie, and McKeown 2013). This emphasis is also found in the Framework for
English Language Proficiency Development Standards (ELP; CCSSO 2012), a frame-
work that corresponds to the CCSS (NGA, CCSSO 2010). In fact, the ELP guidelines
include writing as a language practice that represents ‘a combination of communicative
acts (e.g., saying, writing, doing, and being) used in the transmission of ideas, concepts,
and information in a socially mediated context’ (CCSSO 2012, 2). Effective writing
entails a recursive process of planning, formulation, and revision (Graham et al. 2012)
and one of the foundational elements of writing is spelling. Moreover, those who struggle

*Corresponding author. Email: rbahr@usf.edu

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 2 R.H. Bahr et al.

with spelling are likely to encounter difficulties with text comprehension as well as text
composition (Graham, Gillespie, and McKeown 2013). Yet, spelling is minimized in the
CCSS (NGA, CCSSO 2010) and is unmentioned in the ELP guidelines (NGA, CCSSO
2012), perhaps due to the fact that spelling is still viewed by many as a visual skill that
depends on rote memorization (Bahr, Silliman, and Berninger 2009). In this article, we
present a richer view framed by a descriptive linguistic study of Spanish and English
spelling patterns of bilingual adolescents in naturalistic writing. Results inform both
regular education teachers and teachers of English for speakers of other languages
(ESOL), as well as related educators, as they implement the CCSS to rediscover spelling
instruction as a patterned linguistic activity that offers a distinctive opportunity to support
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their bilingual students who struggle with literacy.

The linguistic framework guiding this work is triple word form theory. Learning to
spell requires learning how to code into memory, analyze, and coordinate three word
forms and their parts into unified representations (Bahr et al. 2012; Berninger, Garcia, and
Abbott 2009; Garcia, Abbott, and Berninger 2010). These word forms involve: (1) the
phonological code that functions as an analyzer of phonemes in spoken words; (2) the
orthographic code that serves to analyze letters, letter groups, and larger letter patterns in
written words; and (3) the morphological code that analyzes root words, prefixes, and
inflectional and derivational suffixes in both spoken and written words. These cross-code
relationships may also influence the richness of vocabulary development in linking new
meanings to their corresponding written forms (Verhoeven and Perfetti 2011) via spelling.
A major advantage of our linguistic framework is the greater insight allowed into the
formative spelling strategies that students employ (e.g., see Bahr et al. 2012) in contrast
to more traditional outcome measures that use various kinds of criteria for spelling
accuracy. Discerning formative patterns of misspellings can illuminate how phonology,
orthography, and morphology become unified in each language as literacy develops.
These integrated representations then allow more cognitive and linguistic resources to be
allocated to achieving reading and writing fluency (Graham and Hebert 2010).

Bilingual influences on spelling

Prior spelling research on kindergarten and elementary school-age bilingual students
focused primarily on how Spanish language knowledge may influence or transfer to
English spelling (Cronnell 1985; Escamilla 2006; Fashola et al. 1996; Howard et al.
2006; Rollo San Francisco et al. 2006; Rubin and Carlan 2005; Sun-Alperin and Wang
2008; Zutell and Allen 1988). Analyzing 27 studies of first language influence on English
spelling (languages included Arabic, Cantonese, and Spanish, among others), Figueredo
(2006) concluded that the interaction of two languages for transfer of spelling knowledge
may be facilitated or hindered by the level and depth of transparencies of the first
language writing system to English. To extend this point, alphabetic languages differ in
the units of analysis accessed for mapping graphemes to phonemes, the impact of
morphology on spelling, and the regularity of correspondences across contexts (Newman
2010). These interrelated factors better describe transparency than the singular notion of
letter-sound correspondences (Silliman et al. in press). It may be the case that what is
often referred to as transfer may actually be instances of interference or the direct
influence of the first language on the second language (Grosjean 2013). Hence, the notion
of transfer by itself sheds minimal light on the phonological, orthographic, and
morphological processes that undergird how students actually misspell. Currently
 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 3

unknown is the similarity of misspellings in Spanish and English in view of the linguistic
similarities between the two languages.
Only two studies used Spanish-only writing samples (Escamilla 2006) or Spanish and
English samples from the same children (Rubin and Carlan 2005). Overall, these studies
revealed two major patterns. The most frequently reported misspelling pattern was letter-
sound confusion, which likely reflected the ambiguity problem that students encountered
with one-to-many mappings in Spanish. For example, misspellings tended to occur in
linking the grapheme c when it preceded the vowels e or i to variable pronunciations of
/s/; for example, carsel for cárcel (jail) (Escamilla 2006). The same issue emerged with
other phonemes represented by more than one grapheme, such as the spelling of Spanish
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words that contained /x or h/, /s/, /k/, and /j/ (Escamilla 2006; Rubin and Carlan 2005).
Allophone variations were a second common pattern (allophones are phoneme variations
that change the phonetic structure of a word, but do not change word meaning). Problems
with allophonic variation, such as /b/ and /v/, would lead to predicted misspellings as
povre for pobre (poor).
On the other hand, eight studies investigated English-only spellings in Spanish
children (Cronnell 1985; Fashola et al. 1996; Howard et al. 2006; Raynolds and Uhry
2010; Rollo San Francisco et al. 2006; Rubin and Carlan 2005; Sun-Alperin and Wang
2008; Zutell and Allen 1988). The most frequently occurring patterns involved vowels
and noncontrastive consonants (i.e., consonants not present in the second language). For
English phonemes not represented in Spanish phonology, students tended to draw on their
Spanish vowel and consonantal knowledge (Cronnell 1985; Raynolds and Uhry 2010),
e.g., fonny for funny and witch for wish. Consonant doubling presented as another
misspelling pattern since doubling is related to the preceding vowel duration in English,
and vowel duration is not relevant in Spanish (Rubin and Carlan 2005), e.g., prity for
pretty. A third robust pattern entailed the misapplication of one-to-many vowel mappings
in English (Fashola et al. 1996; Rubin and Carlan 2005; Sun-Alperin and Wang 2008), as
illustrated by clin for clean.
Triple word form theory has yet to be applied to Spanish-speaking students learning
English (hereafter referred to as bilingual students). The absence of studies is significant
particularly for bilingual students beyond grade 3 who have recently entered the US
educational system. Given the increasing number of students who may be emerging
bilinguals, more in-depth understanding of the phonological, orthographic, and morpho-
logical aspects of their Spanish and English spelling patterns is needed. Furthermore, few
studies have been motivated by a linguistic framework, such as triple word form theory,
and only minimal emphasis has been directed to how each language may differentially
influence triple word form development in the same students.

Approaches to spelling analysis

How spellings are scored filters the view of transfer that is obtained. Most of the bilingual
spelling studies utilized ‘top-down’ approaches, or constrained scoring, in which a
preselected schema, often focusing on orthography, was applied to error classification.
For example, Sun-Alperin and Wang 2008 applied a five-level coding system that
classified inaccurate real word and nonword spellings consistent with English as well as
Spanish. The levels extended from (1) phonologically inappropriate and orthographically
illegal in both languages, such as meat spelled as maat in English and moon spelled as
min in Spanish, to (2) incorrect but phonologically appropriate in Spanish (mit for meat
and mun for moon), said to ‘reflect the influence of Spanish orthography’ (Sun-Alperin
 4 R.H. Bahr et al.

and Wang 2008, 939), to (3) correct in English. In a separate study, Estes and Richards
(2002) were interested in the developmental progression of Spanish orthographic features
in grade 1–5 bilingual students. Their emphasis was limited to grapheme–phoneme
correspondences as represented by 12 preselected features. Scoring focused on the
accuracy of feature production and not word spelling. Grapheme–phoneme correspon-
dences were also the focus of an investigation of the spellings of monolingual Spanish-
speaking children, aged 8–10 years (Justicia et al. 1999). The scoring schema included an
array of predetermined phonological and orthographic features that promoted a more in-
depth analysis of word structure and phoneme position in comparison to other studies;
however, this kind of exhaustive approach has yet to be applied to bilingual students in
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the USA.
As a group, these constrained scoring approaches stress orthography and the extent to
which the development of orthographic knowledge lags behind phonological knowledge
in either Spanish or English. The shared assumption appears to be that spelling
knowledge emerges in a linear manner (e.g., Estes and Richards 2002), with the
phonological component preceding the orthographic component. In contrast, triple word
form theory is premised on a nonlinear ‘bottom-up’ approach, i.e., from the beginning,
spelling draws on multiple sources of knowledge (phonological, orthographic, and
morphological) and these sources developmentally overlap (see Bahr, Silliman, and
Berninger 2009).

Research questions
Given the need for more information on spelling in bilinguals, especially older students,
an existing database of 160 naturalistic Spanish and English writing samples from
bilingual adolescents was selected for analysis (Danzak 2011). These students were asked
to produce narrative and expository texts on four different topics in both Spanish and
English. This database provided a unique opportunity to consider misspellings within the
context of genre since genre influences how writers approach the composition process
(Graham, Gillespie, and McKeown 2013). It may be possible that genre knowledge
influences spelling as well.
The following three questions were addressed by this study:

(1) What is the effect of language and genre on the spelling performance of
bilingual (Spanish–English) adolescents?
(2) Were particular linguistic features more evident in Spanish misspellings
compared to English misspellings?
(3) How does the other language influence English spelling contrasted with Spanish
spelling?

Method
The data in this study were drawn from a larger, mixed methods investigation of the
bilingual writing of Spanish-speaking English learners in middle school (Danzak 2011).
For the current inquiry, the students’ writing samples were evaluated for spelling error
patterns and compared across languages.
 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 5

Participants
A total of 20 bilingual students attending a public middle school (grades 6–8; aged 11–
14 years) located in west central Florida participated. Selection criteria required that
participants be able to write in both Spanish and English based on teacher report and
observations during classroom visits prior to data collection. All participants attended
the ESOL program, which serviced a total of approximately 50 students in grades 6–8,
with each grade level meeting for two 50-minute periods daily. All qualified for
the ESOL program according to formal eligibility criteria in the State of Florida, which
entailed scoring below a certain threshold on a test of listening, speaking, reading,
and writing in English and parent report of a language other than English spoken
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at home.
The participants’ families originated primarily from Mexico (n = 15), as well as
Puerto Rico (n = 4), and the Dominican Republic (n = 1). At the time of data collection,
all participants were on the free/reduced lunch program at their public middle school, and
none had any previous or current record of disability or special education services. All
of the participants received continuous schooling through their current grade level and
had acquired Spanish at home as a first language and English at school as a second
language.
As is commonplace for a group of English language learners (ELLs) in an urban
public school, the previous linguistic and educational experiences of the participants were
diverse. Notwithstanding the location of their birth, 10 participants had received more
than half of their years of schooling in the USA. Of the remaining 10 students, 5 had
arrived within the previous two school years. Given discrepancies in their educational
experience, their skill in academic use of English varied considerably as evidenced by the
participants’ outcomes on the Florida standardized writing test where their scores ranged
from 1 to 5 (of 6), with a mean of 3, the lowest acceptable score (Bureau of K-12
Assessment 2012). However, Bedore et al. (2012) recommend that current levels of
usage, rather than ‘age of first exposure’ (626), are a more reliable predictor of
performance in the second language.

Procedures
Writing samples
As part of a bilingual autobiography project, each student produced two narrative and two
expository texts, each composed in English and Spanish, for a total of eight writing
samples. The students were given structured prompts to guide their composition on the
following topics: Narrative 1: Funny or special family memory; Narrative 2: My first day
of school in the USA; Expository 1: A person I admire; Expository 2: Letter to a new
student. One 50-minute class period was devoted to the composition of each writing
sample. On each occasion, the day’s prompt was projected on a whiteboard in both
languages, read aloud, and briefly discussed by the ESOL teacher and third author before
students began writing independently. Students were instructed what language to use for
the given prompt. They then had 30 minutes to address the prompt, writing by hand. The
language and genre of the elicited texts were alternated. Students wrote on the same topic
in each language approximately a week apart. During the second session with each
prompt, students were allowed to briefly review their previous writing samples as a
reminder of what they wrote earlier. These samples were then taken away and the
students composed new samples in the other language. Over a period of five weeks, this
 6 R.H. Bahr et al.

Table 1. Descriptive characteristics of the writing samples for mean words and misspellings and
the percentage of misspelled words.

Writing sample Mean # of words Mean # of misspellingsa Misspelled wordsa (%)

Spanish
Narrative 1 133.50 22.65 17.16
Narrative 2 183.50 33.95 19.32
Expository 1 135.45 21.70 17.12
Expository 2 149.79 25.89 17.67
English
Narrative 1 120.15 13.10 11.20
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Narrative 2 184.85 21.95 12.13

Expository 1 133.3 15.84 10.58
Expository 2 152.4 18.55 12.21
a
Includes words that were instances of code-switching and other language-influenced features.

process resulted in a total of 160 writing samples, 80 samples in Spanish and 80 samples
in English (see Table 1).

Scoring system
The English version of the phonological-orthographic-morphological analysis of
spelling (POMAS) currently consists of 41 features associated with three linguistic
categories (phonological, orthographic, and morphological) (Bahr et al. 2012). The
POMAS classifies misspellings into these three broad categories and then further
identifies the specific linguistic features, taken from General American English, that are
affected. For instance, if the word sand was misspelled as sad, the error would be
classified initially as a phonological error because not all of the phonological skeleton
elements were represented in the child’s written production. This error would then be
further classified as difficulty with a sonorant (nasal) cluster. However, if the child wrote
sertain for certain, this would be coded as an orthographic error involving an ambiguous
letter because the child was able to convey the appropriate phonology but neglected to
represent the sound with the appropriate orthographic rule. Orthographic errors included
consonant and vowel digraphs, letter doubling, syllabic l, and flaps, among others.
Morphological errors incorporated difficulty with inflections (misst for missed), deriva-
tions (direcsion for direction), and homonyms (e.g., they’re for their). The POMAS also
allows for the possibility that an error might overlap between two areas of development,
like tis for its, which the POMAS classifies as a phonological–orthographic reversal (i.e.,
metathesis).
For this study, four features were added to develop the Spanish version of the
POMAS (the POMAS-S).1 This version takes into account linguistic features that could
occur in the spellings of bilingual individuals.

(1) Allophonic variations: Allophones alter the phonetic structure, but not the
meaning, of the target word; for example, vaso (glass) and envío (delivery) may
be pronounced as /baso/ and /embio/, respectively, resulting in the v being
spelled as a b.
(2) Borrowing: This feature captures how spelling knowledge in one language
influences spelling errors in the initial language (Grosjean 2013). An example
 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 7

would be the English integration of qu into Spanish spelling resulting in cuida

as quida (take care).
(3) Code-switching: A total shift to the other language for a word, phrase, or
sentence followed by a return to the initial language (Grosjean 2013; Reyes and
Ervin-Tripp 2010). These shifts were not misspellings but were counted to
include instances of language transfer. Examples included amigo for friend and
estupideces for stupidities in an English text.
(4) Dialect variations: These spellings replicate the phonological repertoire of the
dialect spoken. For example, in some Mexican dialects, the voiceless fricative
/h/ (represented orthographically as the letter j in Spanish) often substitutes for
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the voiced stop /g/ resulting in the possible spelling of preguntar (to ask) as
prejuntar. Spellings reflecting dialectal influence are orthographic since the
word is phonologically accurate but not orthographically conventional.

Data analysis
Identification of misspellings and agreement
Two bilingual graduate students in Communication Sciences and Disorders identified
misspelled words in all writing samples. The resulting misspelled word lists were then
compared and consensus obtained. Errors involving gender (in Spanish), punctuation, and
sentence capitalization were not considered misspellings.
All misspellings then were coded by two independent raters using the POMAS-S. The
third author (a fluent bilingual) and two Spanish–English bilingual graduate students
coded all of the Spanish misspellings and the first and third authors coded all of the
English misspellings. The independent raters’ codes were compared across all words and
any discrepancies were resolved by a third rater (the first author for the Spanish samples
and the second author for the English samples). The resulting codes were used in future
analyses.

Results
The data were analyzed in two ways to better understand task influences on spelling skill.
In the first analysis, we examined linguistic category errors by language and genre. The
independent variables were: language (Spanish or English) and genre (narrative or
expository). The dependent variable was percentage of errors within each linguistic
category normed by the total number of misspellings produced by each participant. Then
we conducted linguistic analyses identifying the most common linguistic feature errors in
each language.

Effects of language/genre
The number of errors across topics within genre was collapsed by language. The result
was a single independent variable that allowed comparisons across genre and language
(see Figure 1). Given the potential interrelatedness (ipsativity) of the dependent variables,
each linguistic category was analyzed separately with a Friedman’s analysis of variance
(ANOVA).
For morphological errors, the Friedman’s ANOVA was significant (χ2(3) = 47.636, p <
0.001). Post hoc testing was conducted using Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests with a Bonferroni
correction. Since there were four comparisons of interest, the p value was determined to be
 8 R.H. Bahr et al.

100%

90%

80%

70%

Percent of total errors

60%

50%

40% Narrative
30% Expository

20%
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10%

0%
Spanish English

Figure 1. Frequency of morphological errors out of the total number of misspellings across genre.

0.013. As illustrated in Figure 1, three out of four comparisons were significant. More
morphological errors occurred in English than in Spanish for both the narrative and
expository samples (Z = −3.920 and −3.883, p’s < 0.001) and more morphological errors
were noted in the narrative than the expository condition in English (Z = 3.099, p = 0.002).
There was no significant difference attributable to genre in Spanish.
For orthographic misspellings, the Friedman’s ANOVA was significant (χ2(3) =
43.380, p < 0.001). Post hoc testing was conducted using the Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests
with a Bonferroni correction (p = 0.013). As illustrated in Figure 2, three out of four
comparisons were significant. More orthographic errors occurred in Spanish than in
English for both narrative and expository samples (Z = −3.920 and −3.061, p < 0.001
and p = 0.002, respectively) and more orthographic errors were noted in the expository
than the narrative condition in English (Z = 2.651, p = 0.008). There was no difference
attributable to genre in Spanish.
The Friedman’s ANOVAs for the phonological and phonological–orthographic
categories revealed nonsignificant differences across language/genre (χ2(3) = 5.10, p =
100%
90%
80%
Percent of total errors

70%
60%
50% Narrative
Expository
40%
30%
20%
10%

0%
Spanish English

Figure 2. Frequency of orthographic errors out of the total number of misspellings across genre.
 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 9

100%
90%
80%

Percent of total errors

70%
60% Spanish_Narr
50% Spanish_Exp

40% English_Narr
English_Exp
30%
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20%
10%
0%
Phonological Phon-Orthographic

Figure 3. Frequency of phonological and phonological–orthographic errors out of the total

number of misspellings across language and genre.

0.165 and χ2(3) = 5.984, p < 0.112, respectively). Students made relatively equivalent
numbers of misspellings in these categories in both languages and genres. In all instances,
the number of phonological–orthographic errors was less than the number of phonolo-
gical errors (see Figure 3).

Language-specific patterns of misspellings

Since the goal was to identify the most frequently occurring features in each language, a
cutoff frequency criterion of 40 instances was applied. The 40-error cut-off was arbitrarily
set as this boundary suggested that a particular feature occurred about 5% of the time. As
noted in Tables 2 and 3, this narrowed the number of features from 45 to 13 common
features in Spanish and 14 in English.
Orthographic feature errors were the most frequently noted in both languages. Of the
nine orthographic features found in Spanish misspellings, four were also noted in English
misspellings. These included word boundaries and capitalization of proper nouns, both of
which affect the written form independent of language, and silent letter and borrowing
features, which depend on language-specific knowledge.
The most frequently occurring orthographic feature in Spanish misspellings was
ambiguous letters. This feature targets letters that can have multiple phonological
representations, like the pronunciation of the letter c as /k/ and /s/, as in casa and cena.
Next were the errors involving syllable synthesis (e.g., te nia for tenía). Errors with
vowels, voicing, and inappropriate consonant use were also noted. In English, these
students evidenced difficulty with consonant doubling and unstressed vowels (i.e., the
multiple spellings of schwa). These errors would be expected if students relied on their
Spanish phonological knowledge to spell.
Next, there was a difference across languages. Spanish had more phonological errors,
while English had more morphological errors. In terms of phonological feature errors,
epenthesis (letter addition) occurred frequently in both languages. Allophone errors were
prominent in Spanish spellings and consonant cluster reductions and consonant deletions
occurred more often in English misspellings. Difficulty with the morphological feature of
inflected suffixes was noted in both languages, while difficulties with homonyms and
 10 R.H. Bahr et al.

Table 2. Comparison of error types in Spanish by linguistic category and feature for errors that
occurred more than 40 times across all students.

Phonological–
Morphological Orthographic Phonological orthographic

N = 65 N = 1015 N = 304 N = 42

Inflectional suffix Ambiguous letter Allophone Missing vowel

amigo/amigos haser/hacer (n = 177) benga/venga (n = 109) ls/los (n = 25)
(n = 65) Word boundary almenos/ Epenthesis
al menos (n = 132) trahímos/traimos
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Silent letter (n = 43)

ace/hace (n = 106)
One word
te nia/tenía (n = 89)
Capitalization of proper
nouns
estados unidos/
Estados Unidos (n = 81)
Other language influence
la mashina/la machina
(n = 64)
Vowel substitutions
pudia/podía
(n = 60)
Voicing error
nerfioso/nervioso (n = 52)
Consonant error
maestron/maestros
(n = 43)
Note: Examples are provided in italics (misspelling/target).

contractions were noted in English. Code-switching instances will be discussed in the

next section.
Finally, the phonological–orthographic category occurred least frequently in both
languages. It was interesting to note that the prominent linguistic features here differed
across languages. In Spanish, missing vowels were more common, while in English,
reversed letters were more frequent.

Evidence of borrowing and code-switching

Borrowing
To better understand the role of language transfer in these bilingual adolescents, words
identified as borrowings and occurrences of code-switching were analyzed. As described in
Table 4, there were 229 instances of borrowing in the data-set: 64 in Spanish spellings (5%
of the misspellings in Spanish) and 165 in English spellings (10% of the misspellings in
English). These errors could be explained in terms of five separate features: two affected
spelling in both languages and three were unique to English misspellings.
The two most frequently occurring patterns of borrowing involved substitutions of
noncontrastive vowels across languages and the use of linguistic features from the
 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 11

Table 3. Comparison of error types in English by linguistic category and feature for errors that
occurred more than 40 times across all students.

Phonological–
Morphological Orthographic Phonological orthographic

N = 398 N = 865 N = 293 N = 113

Inflectional suffix Capitalization of proper Epenthesis Letters reversed

play/plays nouns transulated/translated tow/two
(n = 171) saturday/Saturday (n = 71) (n = 54)
Code-switching (n = 255) Cluster reduction
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mader/mother Other language influence though/through

(n = 92) quida/cuida (n = 47)
Homonyms (n = 165) Consonant deletion
there/their Grapheme doubling ate/late
(n = 67) until/untill (n = 51)
Contractions (n = 80)
do’nt/don’t Word boundary
(n = 64) usedto/used to
(n = 52)
Silent letter
now/know
(n = 48)
Unstressed vowel error
greatist/greatest
(n = 48)
Note: Examples are provided in italics (misspelling/target).

nontarget language. Both patterns suggested a strong reliance on phonology as the

students tended to utilize similar sounding features from the other language. On the other
hand, the last three features in Table 4 demonstrated a student’s incomplete knowledge of
English spelling conventions. Two of these features illustrate the use of L1 while spelling
in L2, which was most noticeable in the vowel errors. The last pattern revealed an
overgeneralization of L2 spelling patterns. Overall, for this group of students, the
majority of the Spanish-influenced errors in English were vowel-based, while most of
English-influenced errors in Spanish were related to consonant substitutions.

Code-switching
In all, 167 instances of code-switching were noted, 76 in the Spanish texts and 91 in
English, suggesting that code-switching was a relatively infrequent occurrence in either
language. Further analysis revealed that these students tended to use Spanish when they
wanted to express names of foods or cultural items/practices that did not have clear,
obvious translations into English (e.g., tamales, piñata). Other instances of code-
switching involved the simple substitution of a single Spanish word for its equivalent
English word (e.g., amigo for friend, mami for mom). Finally, several instances were
noted where a student chose common expressions or idioms in Spanish (e.g., en las
buenas y en las malas for in good times and bad). The use of English words in Spanish
compositions did not follow a clear pattern. Students frequently used words, like lunch
 12 R.H. Bahr et al.

Table 4. Analysis of the instances of other language influence (OLI) noted in the writing samples
(N = 229; 64 in Spanish samples (L1) and 165 in English samples (L2)).

Linguistic feature Frequency Examples

Substitution of similarly-sounding vowels 80 . L1 in L2 Samples – lake/like; trans-

(i.e., noncontrastive vowels)
Use of linguistic features from the
nontarget language
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leted/translated; Inglish/English
. L2 in L1 Samples – i/hay; my/mi;
lunche/lonche
64 . L1 in L2 Samples – heat/eat; nerbes/
nervous
. L2 in L1 Samples – cinto/quinto;

physica/física
L1 Substitutions (i.e., contrastive vowels) 56 . defferent/different
. fonny/funny
. anderstand/understand
Overgeneralization of L2 spelling pattern 18 . whent/went
. lock/look
Marking of L1 production patterns in L2 11 . esleep/sleep
. estey/stay

and soccer instead of their Spanish equivalents, and often substituted English words for
the Spanish word involving various parts of speech (e.g., pronouns, articles, and
adverbials).

Discussion
Misspellings represent a dynamic process in that individual errors are driven by linguistic
context at a given moment in time. This leads to inconsistencies in misspellings of the
same words within and across individuals. Another issue with a naturalistic writing study,
like this one, is that students were probably selecting familiar words (Graham et al. 2012).
Although inconsistency and familiar vocabulary use might be issues in the assessment of
spelling in natural writing, it did not detract from the sensitivity of the POMAS-S to
identify linguistic feature use in both Spanish and English. Of importance, the POMAS-S
revealed misspellings that went beyond transfer effects. Moreover, results indicated that
these emerging bilingual writers were still in the process of learning to coordinate
multiple linguistic knowledge sources in both languages. Statistical analyses revealed
differences in the proportions of misspellings across the morphological, orthographic, and
phonological categories across languages. Orthographic errors predominated in both
languages similar to findings for adolescent English-only speakers in Bahr et al.’s (2012)
study. More detailed analyses indicated linguistic feature patterns that were shared across
languages and unique to each language, at least for this group of ELLs. Finally, patterns
associated with the other language indicated that borrowing occurred more frequently in
the English compositions. These results are discussed in more detail next.

Language/genre effects on the spelling performance of bilingual adolescents

Statistical analyses showed a language effect. Morphological (predominately inflectional)
errors were more common in English while orthographic errors were more frequent in
Spanish. In terms of genre, there were more morphological errors in the English narrative
writing samples, while orthographic errors occurred proportionately more in the English
 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 13

expository samples. However, the impact of these language/genre differences must be

tempered by the interrelatedness of the dependent variables. In this case, when the
proportion of morphological errors within a condition increases, the orthographic and
phonological categories must also decline because the total percentage of errors must
always equal 100%. Since the current data also showed minimal variation in the
proportions for the phonological category, the difference in proportions could only be
reflected in the morphological and orthographic categories.
These results are interesting in that few morphological errors were evident in Spanish,
a morphologically rich language. In addition, the higher percentage of orthographic errors
in Spanish (approximately 73%) is surprising given the transparency of the Spanish
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language. But the predominance of orthographic errors is similar to previous Spanish

spelling studies (e.g., Arteagoitia et al. 2005; Cronnell 1985; Escamilla 2006) with
younger students. Both of these findings in Spanish could be attributed to artifacts created
by the students’ overall writing proficiency, the writing prompts, the vocabulary choices
made, infrequent writing in Spanish, or a combination of all these factors. However, when
examining the error percentages for the three linguistic categories in English, the results
are similar to Bahr et al.’s (2012) data for English-only participants in grades 6–8. In sum,
despite the relatedness of the dependent variables, the misspelling profile that participants
evidenced was comparable to previous research in both Spanish and English.

Linguistic features in Spanish and English misspellings

Although frequently occurring features differed across languages, four shared orthographic
features were noted: word boundaries, capitalization of proper nouns, silent letter omission,
and borrowing (discussed in another section). The first two, word boundaries and
capitalization for proper nouns, might be challenged as misspellings; however, difficulties
here may indicate inadequate conceptual knowledge about orthographic conventions.
On the other hand, the third feature, silent letter omission, reflects insufficient
coordination of phonological and orthographic knowledge. Most of these errors, which
were inconsistently misspelled, entailed the silent h in Spanish (such as habla), which is
always silent (Real Academia Española 2010), and the wh diagraph in English, which can
be reduced to either phonetic element depending on the vowel context (Venezky 1999)
(e.g., when and whole).2 These variable occurrences highlight the importance of
identifying individual differences, for example, a variation that suggests the activation
of a phonological strategy for English possibly due to uncertainty about how to
orthographically represent the /w/ when the representational schema has not been
consolidated well. The consequence is that a particular student might write when as wen,
and went as whent. Moreover, depending on the expressive intent, insufficient
understanding of when to use wh can also result in the selection of a word from a
related lexical neighborhood, as in the spelling of where for were. Both the phonological
strategy and lexical neighborhood possibilities merit further investigation.
The shared morphological feature involved inflectional suffixes, specifically, plurality
and subject-verb agreement. In general, it may be that students were not monitoring
possible inflectional violations. More in-depth analyses of these inflectional errors,
including the precise contexts of occurrence, is needed in future research.
Finally, epenthesis, or the addition of an unnecessary grapheme, was the only shared
phonological feature. Epenthesis tends to occur more frequently in less mature spellers
(Bahr et al. 2012) and in some bilingual spellers (Cook 1997). The exact reasons for this
have not been systematically studied.
 14 R.H. Bahr et al.

Linguistic features unique to Spanish

A general assumption is that Spanish is a transparent orthography because ‘there is a
more consistent mapping between letters and sounds’ (Newman 2010, 116). The
orthographic feature results from this study suggest that the transparency argument may
be more complex than previously recognized (Justicia et al. 1999). Spanish has five
single graphemes with multiple spellings (c, g, r, y, x) (Real Academia Española 2010),
while English has only three (c, g, x). Examples of Spanish misspellings from the data,
such as ygual for igual and reyna for reina, reflect ambiguity (the graphemes y and i can
be used to represent the same phoneme); that is, in Spanish, it appears that one-to-many
consonantal mappings remained inconsistently mastered for this bilingual group as a
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whole. These errors represent insufficient coordination between phonology and ortho-
graphy because the one-to-many correspondences are rule-governed (Real Academia
Española 2010). On the other hand, this interpretation is mitigated by the fact that, since
these students entered US classrooms, written Spanish has not been a major medium of
learning for them.
The next frequent orthographic error involved the one-word feature or joining
syllables into one word, also found by Justicia et al. (1999). Examples included a qui for
aqui and des de for desde. Here a breakdown occurs between orthography and basic
morphology because the target word is not conventionally produced. As mentioned
earlier, inadequate experience with Spanish written word knowledge may account for this
particular pattern. Other frequent orthographic errors included vowel errors, consonant
voicing, and inappropriate consonant use. These errors indicate inadequate spelling in
general and are unrelated to particular aspects of Spanish orthography.
No morphological features unique to Spanish were found. However, allophonic
consonantal errors were the most frequent phonological feature of the Spanish mis-
spellings, for example, bas for vas (see also Justicia et al. 1999). This error pattern
recognized dialectal variations in Spanish productions; so, if students drew on their
phonological knowledge, the outcome was unconventional spelling.

Linguistic features unique to English

The two orthographic features unique to English misspellings were grapheme doubling
and unstressed vowel errors. Errors involving grapheme doubling, as in leess for less and
fellt for felt, may reflect students’ orthographic knowledge that letter doubling happens in
English, but an uncertainty as to how to apply it. It may also illustrate a lack of
instructional attention to the regularities of when vowels and consonants are doubled
(Joshi et al. 2009). On the other hand, unstressed vowels primarily involved the schwa,
for example, cousen for cousin. Bahr et al. (2012) found that schwa errors were common
across grades 1–9, again pointing to instructional lapses in the explicit teaching of
spelling patterns (see also Joshi et al. 2009).
In terms of morphology, misspellings of homonyms and contractions were common
as also noted in Bahr et al.’s (2012) results. Homonym errors reflect shallow semantic
processing of the specific linguistic context (Mazzocco et al. 2003), commonly resulting
in the selection of a more familiar spelling, e.g., She went to there house. Contractions, on
the other hand, involved apostrophe omission (i.e., can’t to cant) or misplacement
(could’nt for couldn’t), which appear related to how contractible words are transcribed as
opposed to a simple punctuation error (Ferreiro and Pontecorvo 1999). Since the resulting
word can be a nonword, the apostrophe omission involves both orthography and
morphology. This suggests issues with morphological awareness. Since contractions in
 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 15

English are optional, another explanation for apostrophe omission/misplacement could be

language transfer. Spanish only utilizes two obligatory contractions (al and del) neither of
which includes an apostrophe (Commission of Spanish language of the school of public
translators of the city of Buenos Aires [CTPCBA] 2008).
Consonant deletion, a phonological error, was also frequently noted in the English-
only misspellings of students in grades 5–9 (Bahr et al. 2012). This error might occur
when students focus more on what they want to say than the form of individual words.
On the other hand, the frequency of consonant cluster reduction errors was somewhat
unexpected. This pattern was less frequent in Bahr et al.’s (2012) study. However, since
Spanish words contain little to no use of clusters, this error could be indicative of
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language transfer as well.

Borrowing and code-switching

Most of the previous research on Spanish–English spelling focused on the influence of
language transfer (e.g., Cronnell 1985; Escamilla 2006; Fashola et al. 1996; Rollo San
Francisco et al. 2006; Rubin and Carlan 2005; Sun-Alperin and Wang 2008). However, as
noted in the previous section, many misspellings, whether they originate in Spanish or
English, may not always be transfer exemplars but errors that occur in systematic ways,
which are not unique to bilingual spellers. Instead, these errors may represent less than
integrated knowledge of phonology, orthography, and morphology in either language.
Insofar as borrowings and code-switching did occur, their incidence was minimal: 1.18%
of all words in the Spanish samples and 2.13% of the English words. These percentages
should be viewed cautiously as task demands, such as, the language of composition and
familiar vocabulary use may be influencing word choice.
At the very least, language transfer appears more complex than simply the
incorporation of linguistic features from one language to the other language. In fact,
the borrowings and code-switching instances noted in this project seemed to be less
consistent with more categorical notions of transfer (i.e., it is/is not an example of
transfer) and more qualitatively consistent with Garcia’s (2014) notion of translangua-
ging. In the translanguaging process, individuals marshal the available cognitive and
communicative resources of their two languages to accomplish the composing process.
Two caveats are warranted from these qualitative results. First, the sample size is limited
and the writing samples represent student work as solicited by one ESOL teacher and the
third author. Second, frequency data should be viewed as preliminary because of individual
differences in vocabulary and syntactic choices and the nature of the writing tasks.

Research implications
Results of the current investigation highlight the relevance of going beyond concepts of
transfer as the singular mechanism for bilingual spelling patterns to the consideration of
multiple knowledge sources in promoting word consciousness. Aspects of phonology,
orthography, and morphology as embodied in triple word form theory are both universal
and language specific. This presents unique challenges as sequential bilingual students
confront the task of mastering the language of instruction. One obstacle to mastery may
be insufficient metalinguistic sensitivity to word relations in the first language, much less
the second language (see Danzak 2011). If phonological, orthographic, and morpholo-
gical awareness is not automatized at some level in the first language, then this processing
restriction may be reflected in the nature of the misspellings in the second language. An
 16 R.H. Bahr et al.

outcome may be less robust lexical representations, or a reduced vocabulary repertoire, in

both languages, which has implications for word spelling (Perfetti 2011).
The second challenge to mastery pertains to the perception of language proficiency.
As Cummins (2013) has consistently noted, there is the need to ‘distinguish between
conversational fluency and academic aspects of L2 performance’ (11). Moreover, the
level of academic language knowledge needed for grade-level achievement requires an
average of five to seven years to attain (Cummins 2013). Previous study on the bilingual
writing of this group of students (Danzak 2011) strongly suggested that the lexical,
syntactic, and discourse aspects of the academic register in both languages were less well
developed, whether they were previously educated in the USA or elsewhere. A question,
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which merits more refined instructional research to resolve, is whether this gap in the
academic register represents differences from monolinguals in how bilinguals manage
more complex language and literacy learning, as Geva and Farnia (2012) suggest, in
combination with inadequate experience in the analysis and synthesis of word relations in
both Spanish and English.

Educational implications
The importance and outcomes of spelling in literacy instruction for bilingual adolescents
who are emerging writers should not be underestimated. One starting point for educators
is the ELP Framework (CCSSO 2012), which provides helpful guidance for bilingual
students on how to align writing, and by implication, spelling, across the curriculum. In
addition, intervention studies will be needed on the practices that best utilize students’
translanguaging abilities (Garcia 2014) in the implementation of a word study approach
to spelling. This approach should systematically and explicitly teach morphological,
orthographic, and phonological awareness. A translanguaging approach might reciproc-
ally influence Spanish word spelling as well.
Furthermore, all teachers can use findings from the current study as a starting point to
enhance their own understanding about why bilingual students may be producing
particular developmental spelling patterns in written language. Specifically, during the
planning of a lesson, teachers could employ the information in Table 3 to predict potential
errors or misconceptions that bilingual students might make in English spelling. The
point here is that any misspelling pattern can be identified, not as ‘errors to be corrected,’
but as instructional targets in which students should be guided to discover the regularities
of spelling in an explicit and systematic way through developing enhanced word
consciousness. Table 3 provides a springboard for focusing in on middle school student
needs. Thus, in teaching vocabulary in preparation for reading or writing lessons, teachers
could target words containing grapheme doubling (both consonants and vowels) in order to
demonstrate the pattern and then prepare (collaborative) activities that allow bilingual
students to explicitly explore and systematically practice the word patterns through analytic
activities, such as compare–contrast (see Joshi et al. 2009; Moats 2010). Moreover, findings
from this investigation suggest that bilingual instructional models cannot assume the
‘transparency’ of Spanish orthography and educators will have to scaffold students’
development, most likely in the areas of ambiguous graphemes, allophonic variations of a
particular sound, word boundaries, and the inclusion of silent letters.

Acknowledgments
The authors are extremely grateful to the participating bilingual writers and their ESOL teacher for
their contributions. This study would not been possible without the spelling analyses provided by
 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 17

Diana Delgado, Cindy Garrett, and Xigrid Soto. Portions of these data were presented at the 2009
meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the 16th European Conference on
Reading in 2009, and the 23rd World Congress on Reading in 2010.

Notes
1. A copy of the POMAS-S codes, definitions, and examples is available from the first author.
2. For coding purposes, this feature error did not include the silent e for American English.
Instead, silent e was considered a letter-name misspelling (i.e., the silent e makes the vowel say
its name, as in cane).
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