Spelling proves challenging for English learners at La Jolla's College of the English Language, who face phonological, orthographic, and morphological errors, necessitating targeted instruction for improvement.
What aspect of English distresses you most? Idioms and phrasal verbs? Or tenses? Many students who take classes at a prestigious La Jolla, CA, English school say spelling is one of the biggest challenges in English.
There's no denying that English spelling isn't as straightforward as in some other languages - there are even some strange words with totally unpredictable spelling. So no wonder many learners struggle with it. Researchers have found that students can make three types of spelling mistakes. Check the article below to see what they are and how to correct them. Read on!
Three common spelling errors are phonological, orthographic, and morphological. Let’s examine them.
If students can’t match sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes) correctly, they make phonological errors. These students can’t usually hear and pronounce all the sounds in a word correctly (instead of /tiːθ/, they’ll say /tiːf/ for teeth).
Common examples include writing set instead of sent or writing mush instead of much.
To eliminate these mistakes, students should focus on learning all consonant and vowel phonemes to raise their phonemic and phonological awareness. They should work on each sound until they can recognize them in words. Practicing in front of the mirror can be helpful, as the students will become aware of how their mouths move while uttering different phonemes.
Orthographic errors occur when students fail to understand the relationship between graphemes and phonemes. For example, the student will write skool instead of school or kik instead of kick.
These mistakes take place because students haven’t become familiar with the grapheme-phoneme correspondence system and haven’t gotten the hang of written syllable patterns and their arrangement within multisyllabic words. They don’t know spelling patterns for sounds and generalizations (for instance, if the /k/ sound in a monosyllabic word follows a short vowel, it’s spelled “ck”).
If teachers notice these mistakes among their students, instruction should stimulate the understanding of correspondence and patterns in words and between syllables. Teachers should also encourage the automatic recognition of whole words once students accurately decode them.
If students keep writing washt instead of washed, they make morphological errors. These mistakes happen due to students’ lack of morphological awareness. In this case, students aren’t familiar with derivational and inflectional suffixes.
If students spell washt and not washed, this means they haven’t learned the Past Simple Tense and that the suffix -(e)d can be pronounced as /t/, /d/, and /id/.
Another example of morphological errors is when students write catz instead of cats. They hear the phoneme correctly, but they’re unaware of the pronunciation of the plural suffix -(e)s.
If students make many morphological mistakes, they should systematically work on prefixes, word roots, and suffixes.
For instance, when learning plural forms of nouns, they should practice spelling and pronunciation simultaneously to reinforce the connection between suffixes and their pronunciation.
English has been popular among students as it’s one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. It's constantly changing, too, with new words continually being introduced. So, if you want to follow the trend, hone your English, and understand its beauty, come to the College of English Language, the top school in La Jolla and the area. Our native teachers will help you in your language-learning mission.
Drop by on your way to Windansea Beach, pick a course you like, and have fun mastering English in our high-tech classrooms. We’re waiting for you!
