Purpose: Children make spelling errors despite classroom instruction on phoneme-grapheme connections and spelling rules. We examined whether additional practice helps to decrease the number of spelling errors for a morphological spelling rule. We distinguished explicit practice in applying a spelling rule from implicit exposure to correct word…

This study sought to solve the puzzle of persistent occurrence of mechanical errors in pre-service primary school teachers' writings. Data consisted of short compositions from four intact classes (n=75) of second-year university students at the Higher Institute of Arts and Crafts of Tataouine (ISAMT), Tunisia. Results of data analysis revealed a…

We investigated spelling errors in English and Spanish essays by Spanish-English dual language learners in Grades 1, 2, and 3 (N = 278; 51% female) enrolled in either English immersion or English-Spanish dual immersion programs. We examined what types of spelling errors students made, whether they made spelling errors that could be due to…

We investigated spelling errors in English and Spanish essays by Spanish-English dual language learners in Grades 1, 2, and 3 (N = 278; 51% female) enrolled in either English immersion or English-Spanish dual immersion programs. We examined what types of spelling errors students made, whether they made spelling errors that could be due to…

There is growing evidence that dyslexia may involve difficulty with implicit learning, which may hinder learners with dyslexia to acquire spelling skills in a foreign language through implicit instruction. Paradoxically, this is exactly how Dutch students with dyslexia learn English spelling at school. This research aims to determine if…

The current study investigated whether shared phonology across languages activates cross-language meaning when reading in context. Eighty-five bilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Critical sentences contained English members of English-French interlingual homophone pairs (e.g., "mow"; French homophone…

There is growing evidence of systematic underachievement of South African primary school learners in reading in English as the first additional language. There is a small but growing literature that provides insights, that is, causes, patterns and prevalence, into this phenomenon. Through a secondary analysis of a spelling component of a literacy…

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…

There is a large body of research indicating that L2 learners often have trouble with the word form. Learners often transfer their L1 processing routines over to the L2 in their attempt to process the L2 forms, whether those routines are appropriate to the L2 form system or not. This study explores the problems of learning L2 vocabulary word form…

A descriptive study examined: the relative influence of native language (L1) literacy skills and second language (L2) oral proficiency on students' ability to read and spell in the second language. A second dimension of the study examined students' second language misspellings in order to identify examples of positive and negative transfer of L1…