Spelling Performance by Spanish Primary Students Using English as a Second Language: Analysis of the Most Common Mistakes

Abstract

This article reports upon findings drawn from a research project involving undergraduate student teachers from Villanueva University Centre and a group of third-year primary school students, undertaken from March to December 2017. Learning to write in English is an emerging skill at this age, one which is influenced by various factors: the child’s reading and writing skills in their mother tongue and their oral competence in the English language. As a result, a strictly phonetic Spanish orthography conflicts with the irregularity and complexity of English spelling. The aims of the project were to enhance the writing skills in English of third-year primary school students, analyse their most common spelling mistakes, and delve into their origins. With this in mind, a taxonomy of mistakes was elaborated, divided into the five most common errors: letter omission, letter addition, phonetic spelling, L1 interferences and miscellaneous. This taxonomy was applied to 135 children’s writings on a sentence level. The results may have promising pedagogical implications. Two more types of errors were discovered: a changed grapheme order and a mistake in compound word separation. We concluded that an incorrect phonetic spelling was the most frequent cause for these types of errors, followed by L1 interferences. Finally, a list of most frequently misspelt words was elaborated.