汪嘉希 南开大学泰达学院
中图分类号：G688.2 文献标识码：A 文章编号：ISSN1672-2051（2021）03-122-04
Introduction
In the process of learning English, it is common that learners in different levels often make spelling mistakes, especially high school students aged from 15 to 18. As Carney (1994: 79) mentioned, spelling mistakes which caused by the complex writing system lay the foundation for improvement of literacy, and the mistakes are needed to be carefully analyzed. Making spelling errors is inevitable for every English learner, and different aged learners have variable extents of spelling ability. (Rice, 1958: 174) For high school students, five kinds of spelling mistakes are obvious, which include insertion, omission, substitution, transposition, and grapheme. The NFER Survey (1993) showed that the mistakes of omission take up the biggest percentage. The spelling mistakes usually changed with the phonology, vocabulary, grammar, and spelling rules, which are the main factors influencing children’s spelling. (Jeffcoate, 1992: 147) To collect the data which is about the Chinese high school students’ spelling mi stakes, I interviewed a Chinese English teacher of a high school and asked her to collect the categories of errors by analyzing the compositions of all the students in her class.
The result of research shows the main factors are phonology and spelling rules. Therefore, I focused on the two factors by analyzing them. Firstly, phonology which is about the sound system may affect spelling, because the poor pronunciation and the lack of phonological knowledge may cause spelling errors. Secondly, different kinds of spelling rules may usually confuse the high school students. It is regarded as the biggest problems in the process of English learning which may cause various kinds of spelling mistakes, such as the errors of coinage, noun plural, and verbs’ formation. (Liping, 2005)
Different Kinds of Spelling Mistakes
The students’ spelling mistakes can be showed from their compositions or dictations, which are the main sources for collecting these errors. And after the spelling mistakes are collected, they can be categorized as insertion, omission, substitution, transposition and grapheme substitution. (Cook and Bassetti, 2005: 34) The NFER Survey (1993) showing the proportions of the five main spelling mistakes includes insertion (17%), omission (36%), substitution (19%), transposition (5%), and Grapheme substitution (19%).
Insertion
The insertion error is defined as inserting one letter into the original word. (Cook and Bassetti, 2005: 167) From the figure 6.3 of Cook and Bassetti (2005: 171)’s study, we can find it is common to insert consonant letters and vowel letters at the word-final position, especially the vowel e has the highest frequency (95%) to be inserted at the end of the word. This kind of error often happens to Chinese students like the addition of e. (Cook, 1999) A big amount of high school students can not distinguish when to add e or delete it. Such as the word ‘develop’, they often write it as ‘develope’, and ‘exist’ usually can be written as ‘existe’. In my former high school class, many students had the same problem and it was difficult to be corrected. Another insertion mistake is double-written syllable. A lot of high school students who don’t remember the rules may add the double written syllable when it should not be, for example, ‘opinion’ is wrongly spelled as ‘oppinion’. (Liping, 2005)
Omission
When spelling English words, students may miss letters, so that for poor spellers, omission was regarded as the most typical spelling mistake. (Treiman, 1998: 378) By studying on a group of students, Treiman (1998) also found the students were more likely to omit sonorant than obstruent for the consonant. Chinese high students often make spelling errors for the mistakes of sound deviation. The vowels and consonants which are weak syllables can be easily missed. Moreover, dumb syllables are most likely to be omitted, such as e and s, etc. For example, students may incorrectly spell creat (create), concious (conscious), opposit (opposite). (Liping, 2005) As Cook (1999) mentioned, one of the features of Chinese spelling mistakes is the omission of consonants, such as ‘subjet’ (subject). This phenomenon is common among Chinese high school students, although they have tried their best to learn the vocabulary by heart, when write compositions or dictations, they still forget to add the dumb letter, like e, in the final position, such as ‘castle’ usually may be spelled as ‘castl’ instead.
Substitution
Another typical spelling error is substitution, which means replace the letter with other one. It also takes up a big proportion (19%) in the categories of spelling mistakes showed in NFER Survey (1993). A table from Cook and Bassetti (2005: 169)’s research shows 38.6% of the Japanese writers have substitution errors of b for v at the word-initial position, and 16% of them have such errors of r for l, which is because of the phonology of Japanese. For Chinese high school students, spelling may be affected by English phonology. From my own experience as a high school student, I often incorrectly spelled ‘fabric’ as ‘fabrik’, because c and k are both pronounced as /k/. In our class, many students usually wrote ‘happyness’ (happiness) by substituting y for i, which attributed to the grammatical rules about change y for i when adding the suffix.
Transposition
Transposition error, as one of the spelling mistakes, means a change in the initial order of letters when writing a word. A point in case is the spelling of ‘trial’, which may be easily spelled as ‘trail’. (Nierenberg, 1996: 48) Despite this kind of error only takes up 5% in the proportions of spelling mistakes, it is an obvious error among students. The diagraphs (‘th’), vowels (‘ie’), and consonant vowel pairs (‘ce’) may be frequently transposed. (Cook, 1999)
Grapheme Substitution
Taking up the same proportion (19%) as the substitution error, grapheme substitution error, which often appears among the students who always believe in the alphabetic principle, (Cook, 2004: 141), is regarded as ‘a substitution error when they spell a phoneme with the wrong grapheme’. (Treiman, 1993: 79) For the Chinese high school students, grapheme substitution errors are comparatively less than primary children, because of their vocabulary size and higher English level. However, some of them still misspell the words for changing the graphemes, because they often mechanically learn English words by heart. Thus, the Chinese high school students spell ‘cote’ instead of ‘coat’, ‘lite’ instead of ‘light.’ (Liping, 2005)
Factors Influencing Spelling Mistakes
To research on the main categories of spelling mistakes, and the reasons as well as factors which may influence the high school students’ English spelling, I interviewed my friend who is an English teacher of a well-known high school in Chongqing, China, and asked her to collect the data of spelling errors by checking students’ compositions.
Table 1
Unintentional Errors Insertion
(controll/control) Omission
(creat/create) Substitution
(happyness/happiness) Transposition
(piece/piece) Grapheme substitution
(ort/ought)
Intentional Errors Omission
(gov/government)
Table 1, provided by my interviewee shows the spelling mistakes of high school students, can be divided into two categories: unintentional and intentional errors. The first category including all the spelling mistake categories I mentioned in the previous paragraph is very common in students’ English learning process. While the intentional mistakes, as my interviewee mentioned, are generally made by students who take notes for English dictation or other listening exercises. When listen to the English materials, students have to write down the key words within short time. Thus, they are required to shorten the words by omitting letters, such as ‘gov (government)’, ‘stu (student)’, ‘uni (university)’.
The interviewed high school English teacher emphasized the main wiring problem for students is the unintentional spelling errors, on which I will focus in the following paragraphs. My interviewee checked all the compositions of the students in her class, and found different kinds of spelling mistakes. In order to research the factors influencing spelling, she helped me to make a statistics of all the mistakes by observing her students in the class. She investigated the latest compositions and designed questions to ask her students including: which kind of spelling mistakes do you often make? What factors do you think mostly affect your spelling or cause your spelling mistakes? The result showed that there are four main factors included: phonology, grammar, vocabulary and different spelling ways.
Table 2
Factors Phonology Spelling Rules Vocabulary Grammar
Proportions 33% 50% 7% 10%
From table 2, we can find most spelling mistakes of the students in her class attribute to their phonology and spelling rules which take up the biggest proportions among the four main factors. Therefore, in the following paragraphs, I will focus on the influence of phonology and spelling rules on students’ spelling mistakes.
The Influence of Phonology on Spelling Mistakes
As some researchers put it: ‘A large number of spelling errors are traceable to the particular pronunciation used by the speller’ (Carney, 1994: 84) and ‘English has an alphabetic writing system that maps letters on to speech-sounds and speech-sounds on to letters’, (Carney, 1997: 2) they suggest the relationship between phonology and English spelling. The English spelling mostly related to vowel and consonant which refer to sounds rather than letters. (Carney, 1997: 5) Therefore, students may easily make spelling mistakes because of their poor phonological knowledge.
Mistake 1: Loss of weak syllable
As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the loss of weak syllable and the deletion of silent syllable which belong to omission errors are both relevant to phonology of English. According to phonology rules, English letters have different pronunciations when they become weak syllable, such as s which is pronounced as /z/ when it belongs to weak syllable. For instance, in an English word ‘husband’, s is a weak syllable followed by the stressed syllables ‘hu’. (Jespersen, 1964: 30) My interviewee also mentioned this typical example after she checked the compositions of her students. The high school students in her class often incorrectly spelled ‘husband’ as ‘huband’ , and the other example is ‘pumpkin’ is misspelled as ‘pumkin’. Both of these examples illustrate the weak syllables (s and p) are easily to be omitted.
The omission of weak syllable demonstrates the stressed syllables are uneasily to be deleted, and the weaker ones of speech sounds can be more easily omitted. It is because students are sensitive to the stressed syllables, but often ignore the weaker ones, which implies they have not acquired the right pronunciation. (Liping, 2005)
Mistake 2: Deletion of silent syllable
Silent letter, a term appeared in the previous paragraph, is regarded as a letter which exist in the spelling of a word without pronouncing when the word is read, such as k in ‘know’, h in ‘hour’ and w in ‘wrong’. (Hildyard and Morris, 2000: 112) The high school English teacher I interviewed provided me with an important case which is about the omission of d in the word ‘handsome’. It is a most frequent mistake made by a majority of students in her class. By meeting those students made this error, my interviewee realized that they have had the habit of spelling words according of their sounds. In ‘handsome’, d is a dumb syllable, and it is why this letter is frequently omitted. The deletion of silent syllables indicates the effect of sound transcription on English spelling, because it may lead to graphic transcription. Among the dumb letters, e is the letter most easily being deleted. (Liping, 2005)
Mistake 3: Inference from L1(the First Language)
As Cook (2004: 141) mentioned: “characteristics of their first language may equally contribute a spelling ‘accent’ to their writing,” therefore, L1 of English learners may cause inference in their English spelling, since a large number of spelling mistakes are due to the phonological system of their mother tongue. Chinese speakers often ignore the correct writing forms of pluperfect. For instance, they often write ‘it is learn by…’ or ‘she is murder’ without adding t or ed, because they have trouble in pronouncing the final consonants. (Carney, 1997: 85)
Furthermore, the dialect of English non-native speakers causes spelling problems. An example is Scottish students who spell a series of words which are purely Scottish, like ‘wee’, ‘tig’ and ‘currant’. (Carney, 1997: 60) Another survey made by Bojarsky (1969) is about the spelling errors made by students of a rural high school in Appalachian mountain of West Virginia. The students’ front vowel in their dialect and formal English differ in many aspects, for example, they pronounce /i/ instead of /i:/, thus they spell ‘still’ instead of ‘steal’. (Cited by Carney, 1997: 61)
Chinese high students are affected by their dialect in the same way. Every province, even every city has their own dialect, and some of them are totally different. Hereby, Chinese high school students have various spelling mistakes due to their phonological systems from dialects. My interviewee, as a high school English teacher, told me the different English sounds may cause different spelling ways, and poor pronunciation may exert bad effect. A typical example is a student from Wenzhou of China. She was deeply influenced by the dialect, in which /g/ is seldom pronounced. Hence when spell the English words that have the sound /g/, she always omit the letter ‘g’, for example, ‘language’ is misspelled as ‘lanuage’. Different from her, another student from Sichuan Province of China doesn’t have the habit of pronouncing nasal syllables. For the Pinyin in Chinese phonology system, she pronounces /n/ for /l/ instead. Consequently when spells English words, she always writes ‘loodle’ (‘noodle’).
The Influence of Spelling rules on Spelling Mistakes
There are some rules as well as exceptions of rules exist in English spelling. Therefore, it is important for the students to remember these rules and exceptions which are helpful to reduce their spelling mistakes. (Field, 2003: 65)
Mistake 1: Plurals
Usually, s is added in the end of a noun as the form of plural, such as ‘apples’ (apple), ‘findings’ (finding), ‘birds’ (bird), etc. However, when the final letter of a noun is y following a consonant, the plural form is established by changing y into i with es being added, such as ‘theories’(theory), ‘poetries’(poetry), companies (company), etc. If the letter before y is a vowel, the y doesn’t change into i and the s is added directly in the final position, such as monkeys (monkey). (Field, 2003: 66) My interviewee told me the plural errors are common in her class, because students often forget to change y into i for the letter ends with y and a consonant before it. A typical example provided by her is a student wrote ‘familys’(families) in every composition. Such a high frequency of mistake illustrate this student still cannot master the plural spelling rules. According to Field (2003: 66), another plural spelling rule is if the final letter of a noun is o with a consonant before, its plural form ends in es, such as heroes (hero). In contrast, if before o in this noun is a vowel, its plural form ends in s, such as zoos (zoo). Additionally, if nouns end in s, x, sh, ch, or z, their plural forms need to add es behind, such as classes (class), churches (church), etc. Whether add s or es after the noun confuses high school students, and since they cannot remember the rules above, the similar mistakes frequently happen in their English writing.
Besides the plural spelling rules above, another spelling mistakes is the wrong forms of countable nouns (irregular nouns), and uncountable nouns. For instance, ‘knowledges’, ‘drinkes’ are the representative errors among students. (Liping, 2005) From the students’ compositions, my interviewee said many students wrote mediums (medium), datas (data), and informations (information), which indicate they have not mastered the plural spelling rules of irregular and uncountable nouns. Such kind of mistake is a necessary result of mechanical memory of students, as Liping (2005) said: ‘The main cause of such kind of errors is overgeneralization’ and ‘the errors occur especially on special nouns.’
Mistake 2: Coinage
Coinage commonly appears in English spelling, in which main forms are: suffix, prefix, and compound words.
Suffix including noun, adverb and adjective suffix, is used when the forms of words need to be changed. The three kinds of suffix are most universal, and the errors of noun suffix are most easily made by students, such as the wrongly use of ‘-ment’, and ‘-ness’ (Liping, 2005) Through investigating the Chinese high students, I have found the most obvious mistake is the wrong formation of ‘acceptment’ (acceptance), which happened in 30% of the students. In addition, adverb and adjective suffix errors are the incorrect use of ‘-ly’, ‘-ful’, ‘-able’, etc. (Liping, 2005)
Wrongly use of prefix is the second mistake of spelling of coinage. The different prefix groups with the same meaning are a reason of confusing students, such as ‘hyper-’ and ‘hypo’, ‘dis-’, ‘in-’, ‘im-’ and ‘un-’, etc. (Carney, 1997: 405) The latter pair of prefix, known as negative prefix, can change the meaning of an adjective. (Liping, 2005) However, such kinds of prefix have different forms according to the following adjective, and students usually wrongly spell prefixes, for instance: inperfect (imperfect), discomfortable (uncomfortable).
As a form of coinage, compound means ‘combining more than two words with hyphen, or combining directly two words together,’ such as ‘well-known’. (Liping, 2005) But in fact, as Baocui (2001: 69) said, many Chinese high school students like to wrongly link any words together which attributes to the habits of Mandarin and Chinese thinking way. (Cited by Liping, 2005)
Mistake 3: Tense of Verbs
The spelling mistakes often happen when the tense of verbs being changed, especially when the irregular verbs are changed into past tense or pluperfect. Such kinds of mistakes are the past tense of ‘ride’ is often written as ‘rided’ (rode), the pluperfect and past tense of ‘learn’ is written as ‘learned’ (learnt), the pluperfect of ‘come’ is written as ‘came’ (come). The cause of these errors attribute to the overuse of general rules of verbs’ forms, (Liping, 2005) which usually include adding ed or d after a verb as the forms of its past tense or pluperfect. Therefore, the irregular verb’s formations often confuse students who mechanically remember the language rules.
For a verb ending with y, its past tense and pluperfect is generally change y into i and add ed in the end. For example, the past tense and pluperfect of ‘marry’ is ‘married’. (Field, 2003, 67) However, the past tense and pluperfect of those verbs that ends in y with a vowel in front is adding ed directly. As my interviewee told me, this kind of spelling errors in the compositions of the students in her class indicate they are confused by this rule, hence they often wrong spelled ‘accompanyed’ (accompanied).
Other mistakes
There are other spelling mistakes relating to spelling rules. As Carney (1994: 72) listed, the spelling rules include: when ‘all’ in the front position of a word, it has to be change into ‘al’, such as ‘almost’, ‘alright’, and ‘always’; When a word ending in e is added a suffix ‘-ful’, the e need to be retained, except in ‘awful’. Additionally, when switching an adjective ended with y into an adverb, the y needs to be changed to i and added ‘ly’. If there is ‘ic’ in the end of a word, ‘-ally’ needs to be added as a form of adverb. (Field, 2003, 75) The high school students I investigated frequently make this mistake for deleting e when adding ‘-ful’, adding ‘ly’ directly without changing y into i, and adding ‘ly’ after the words end in ‘ic’ rather than adding ‘-ally’. For example, a majority of them wrote ‘hateful’ instead of ‘hateful’, ‘magicly’ instead of ‘magically’, etc.
Conclusion
English spelling mistakes can not be prevented in the process of learning. The main spelling mistakes, including insertion, omission, substitution, transposition and grapheme substitution, commonly happened in Chinese high school students and vary with the students’ phonological errors, grammatical errors, vocabulary, and their misuse of spelling rules. By interviewing a high school English teacher of China and investigating her students’ unintentional spelling mistakes, I found the main factor influencing their spelling is phonology and spelling rules. Firstly, English sound and pronunciation may cause spelling errors. Those weak or dumb syllables are easily to be omitted. Furthermore, the phonology of L1 usually causes inference to their English spelling, as Cook (2004: 141) put: ‘L2 learners bring along with them the phonology of their first language’, such as the Chinese dialects often affect the English pronunciation, consequently the English spelling also will be affected. Secondly, the general English spelling rules also may cause errors of spelling if students forget or overuse them, such as the written rules of plural, coinage, and verbs as I mentioned above.
Because ‘spelling mistakes give an unprofessional impression and imply a lack of attention to detail’, students need to get over their spelling difficulties and try to spell the English words correctly. ’From the research of Liping (2005) about psychological analysis spelling mistakes, we can find the high school students’ individual careless character, poor memory for vocabulary, their anxious emotion, and fossilization (mechanical memory) are the main reasons influencing students’ spelling behavior. Therefore, firstly high school students have to deal with their own psychological factors and make the good habit of checking their spelling frequently. They need to make use of dictionaries to check the spelling rather than guessing the meaning of the words all the time. (Field, 2003, 75) Moreover, English teachers have to focusing on correcting students’ spelling. (Liping, 2005) Under the efforts from both teachers and students, the spelling mistakes will be gradually reduced.
Reference
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