Phonological and orthographic problems in EFL college spellers

Abstract

36 EFL freshmen students took a listening-spelling test in which they filled out 100 blanks in a dialogue. Results indicated that 63% of the spelling errors were phonological, 37% were orthographic. Saudi freshman spellers in general have more phonological problems with whole words but more orthographic problems with graphemes. The most common phonological problems that poor spellers have are: Inability to hear and discriminate all or most of the phonemes in a word, hearing and inability to discriminate vowel phonemes and hear the final syllable or suffix. They mostly have orthographic problems with vowel digraphs, double consonants, silent vowels and consonants and homophones. A detailed report of EFL students are given.