Teachers' perception of spelling patterns and children's spelling errors: A cross-linguistic perspective

This paper is a cross-linguistic examination of teachers’ perception of morphologically-mediated spelling patterns, compared with children’s actual spelling performance on these same patterns. The study was conducted on two languages differing greatly in their typologies: Hebrew and Dutch. The research design of this study consisted of two spelling tests, one for Hebrew and one for Dutch. Each spelling test contained 32 target items with homophonous graphemes, equally divided into four groups of conditions, differing in degree of morphological and morphophonological cues. These spelling tests were first administered to 192 Israeli and 192 Belgian gradeschool children. Hebrew-speaking children generally scored higher than Dutch-speaking children, and found the conditions which required morpho(phono)logical analysis easier to spell than Dutch-speaking children. 40 Israeli and 40 Belgian collegeand university-trained L1 teachers were given the 32 items of these respective spelling tests and asked (i) to identify the pairs of items that made up the test; and (ii) to motivate their identification. On both identification and motivation, Dutch teachers generally scored higher than Hebrew teachers, and they did better exactly on those conditions that Hebrew-speaking children found easier than Dutch-speaking children. One conclusion of this study is that the underpinnings provided by the language structure determine learning patterns in spelling development. Another conclusion is that patterns of spelling regularity, easily perceived by language teachers, may not be so easily grasped by their learners. We hypothesize that the explicit metalinguistic formulation of consistencies underlying spelling patterns operates differently than natural information processing in language use.