Knowledge of Spelling: An Experimental Study of ESL Learners in Primary Education

Abstract

This study aims to examine children’s knowledge of spelling in relation to three stages of
spelling development (phonological stage, orthographic stage, and morphological stage), and to
identify the amount of learning happening across grades. The subjects are children of first grade
and third grade from St. Peter Primary School, Hyderabad, India. Two types of tasks have been
conducted: production task and choice task. Frequency and percentage of the words spelled
correctly have been used to analyze the data of the two tasks. The study found that there is a
grade-wise development in spelling acquisition; third grade children have better accuracy than
first grade children in both tasks (production and choice). However, both grades have achieved
better performance in the choice task than the production task. The study also revealed that the
first graders are still in the phonological stage of spelling development since they depend mostly
on graphotactic clues when spelling words. On the other hand, the third graders have reached,
to some extent, the orthographic stage of spelling acquisition since they use more graphotactic
clues to spell words than first-grade children.