Phonological and Orthographic Problems in EFL College Spelling

36 EFL freshmen students took a listening‐spelling test in which they filled out 100 blanks in a dialogue. It was found that 63% of the spelling errors were phonological and 37% were orthographic. Detailed analyses showed that the most common phonological problems that poor spellers had were: hearing and discriminating all or most of the phonemes in a word, hearing and discriminating vowel phonemes and hearing the final syllable or suffix. They had orthographic problems with vowel digraphs, double consonants, silent vowels and consonants and homophones. A simplification process seems to be followed by Saudi freshman students in spelling English words with double consonants, silent consonants and vowels; and with vowel and consonant digraphs. The simplification process can be explained in the light of the Arabic spelling system which is mainly phonetic, i.e. many orthographic weaknesses can be attributed to transferring the Arabic spelling system into English. Arabic has no silent and double vowels and consonants and no vowel and consonant digraphs. Another explanation is that poor freshman students do not seem to associate the word form (as in homophones) with its meaning and pay attention to the semantic and syntactic context in which the word occurred while listening to the input. Phonological and orthographic problems and the sources of those problems will be reported in detail. 

Prof. Reima Al-jarf
King Saud University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/aljarf