Common Spelling Errors of Omani College Students (original) (raw)

2020, Education and Society in the Middle East and North Africa English, Citizenship and Peace Education Edited by Sergio Saleem Scatolini and Milton A. George

According to Caravolas, Hulme, & Snowling (2001) and Treiman (1998), one of the most important components of writing at the single-word level is spelling. This means that students should have the basic knowledge of how to correctly write a word before they can construct a correct sentence. When students struggle with spelling, they tend to write less as they find it difficult to express their ideas on paper. As such, it is imperative to analyse the most common spelling mistakes made by students so that adequate corrective measures may be taken to enhance their writing. This study looks into the spelling errors made by post-foundation students of Al Musanna College of Technology (ACT), Sultanate of Oman, and seeks to classify said errors using Cook’s four categories, namely omission, substitution, insertion, and transposition. It also examines the difference in the frequency of spelling errors per gender. Further, this paper tries to find out the possible causes of these spelling errors so as to create a corpus of information that can be used in teaching to address the issue. The data analysed for this study are from the written outputs of 53 females and 38 males who are in their advanced diploma level. The results showed that errors by substitution are the most frequent. Conversely, transposition errors are the least common. The results also showed that females are less prone to commit spelling errors than their male counterparts. The irregularity of English spelling is one of the reasons why students commit spelling errors. As there are often exceptions in English spelling (e.g. in the case of the schwa and silent letters), students found it hard at times to write the target words. It also transpired that the respondents relied on a one-to-one approach or phoneme-grapheme correspondence when they spelled English words (which led to substitution or errors by omission). Moreover, the differences between the Arabic and English sound systems caused the students to misspell some words, for lack of phonological awareness in writing is also a factor that results in misspellings. Keywords: spelling errors, Omani college students, classifications of errors, omission, substitution, insertion, transposition