Spelling Errors And Its Relationship With Spelling Teaching

The present study was designed to examine whether explicit instruction of phonetic rules could help reduce the spelling errors for English learners in middle schools. A questionnaire showed that the most difficult thing for junior high school students to learn English is to spell words correctly. The spelling sample errors were collected by a series of tests. Through a qualitative analysis. We found that spelling errors (auditory or visual errors) were related to pronunciation. This paper tried to approach to the possibility to improve students spelling correct rate by systematic phonetic instructions while learning new words. If it is possible, how do different dimensions of phonetic awareness function in the dynamic change of the correct rate.The present study includes an experiment which was conducted in Putian No.28 Middle School. 100 students from two randomly chosen classes participated the experiment. The subjects finished a test of dictation and Chinese-English word translation so as to collect sample errors for the further design of the phonetic instruction. Then one class was chosen for the experimental group and the other for the control group. During the experiment, the control group received the conventional vocabulary teaching , but the experiment group received the extra instruction of phonetic rules. After a period of ten weeks, two kinds of spelling tests----Chinese-English word translation and dictation were made to both groups of subjects. The data was processed by One-way ANOVA with the findings as follows: (1) The experimental group did much better than the control group in spelling tests. They not only did better in the spelling of familiar words that they have been taught but also in the new words. And the error rate is lower than that of the control group. (2) There were more vowel-related errors than consonant-related ones in both experimental group and the control groups . (3) The instruction of the phonetic rules was more effective in reducing consonant-related errors than reducing vowel-related errors.