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Spelling performance of English consonants among students whose first language is Arabic

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Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine the influence of some aspects of the Arabic phonological system on spelling English words. In Study 1, the spelling performance of Arabic students from grades four and six was compared with English students in cognate phoneme pairs which exist across both languages (/d/ and /t/), and pairs in which only one of the phonemes exists in Arabic (/b/ and /p/, /f/ and /v/) using a spelling test which contained words with the target phonemes. The findings showed that the Arabic participants performed similarly to the English participants on the phonemes /t/ and /d/, but they tended to spell the phonemes /b/, /p/, /f/, and /v/ using their cognate pairs more often than the English participants did. In Study 2, the spelling performance of Arabic students was compared across grades 4, 6, 8, and 10 for the same target phonemes. The analyses showed no difference between the Arabic participants in how often they confused the target phonemes with their cognate pairs across the different grade levels, except for the phonemes /p/ and /v/, for which the effect size was small. The findings of this study demonstrate the importance of phonology in spelling, as well as the influence of the first language on spelling in a second language. They also indicate that Arabic students continue to be dependent on phonological processes when spelling English words even as they grow older.

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Notes

  1. The term novel phonemes is used in this study to refer to phonemes which are novel to the Arabic students, meaning that they do not exist in their first language (namely, /p/ and /v/). The same term was used for phonemes which do not exist in Cantonese by Wang and Geva (2003).

  2. Phoneme pairs are consonants which share the same articulatory features with the exception of voicing (one is voiced and the other is voiceless). The phoneme pairs in English are /p/ and /b/, /t/ and /d/, /k/ and /g/, /f/ and /v/, /s/ and /z/, /θ/ and /ð/, /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, and /ʃ/ and /ʒ/.

  3. There are two more phonemes which could have been included in this category: /g/ and /ʧ/. However, these two consonants exist in our participants’ Spoken Arabic even though they do not exist in Standard Arabic and they do not have a written form. Spelling errors with these two phonemes as a consequence has an entirely different dimension and would be due to different reasons than spelling errors with /p/ and /v/ as both Standard and Spoken Arabic could influence spelling in English. Therefore, /g/ and /ʧ/ (and perhaps their phoneme pairs /k/ and /dʒ/) should be pursued in future research.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dr. Rebecca Treiman, Washington University, for her valuable comments on a draft of the study outline; to Dr. Abdulameer A. Allaith, Dr. Hussain Ali Yahya, and Suzanne Carreker for their generous help in the data collection; and to the participants and all those who contributed directly or indirectly to this study.

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  1. College of Education and Human Development, Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, 77843-4232, USA

    Zainab A. Allaith & R. Malatesha Joshi

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  1. Zainab A. Allaith
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  2. R. Malatesha Joshi
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Correspondence to Zainab A. Allaith.

Appendix

Appendix

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Table 5 Target words used in the dictation task
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Allaith, Z.A., Joshi, R.M. Spelling performance of English consonants among students whose first language is Arabic. Read Writ 24, 1089–1110 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-010-9294-3

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