Background: Spelling is a vital component of literacy. This is because spelling includes multiple metalinguistic components, such as phoneme-grapheme awareness, orthographic awareness and morphophonemic knowledge. Despite this, there remains, to date, insufficient literature on spelling in the Southern Bantu languages and, more specifically, in isiXhosa.Objectives: This study explores the nature of spelling among Grade 3 isiXhosa home-language learners and provides a linguistic analysis of the types of errors produced by these learners.Method: Data were collected from 51 isiXhosa home-language learners using a carefully designed isiXhosa spelling task, which included both real and pseudowords.Results: The findings showed that grapheme complexity was a significant predictor of spelling error production in isiXhosa. Furthermore, the main error type for both real words and pseudowords was errors of omission, specifically 〈n〉 in nasal blends and 〈h〉 in aspirated digraphs.Conclusion: While the isiXhosa orthography is transparent, and thus relatively predictable in decoding, its agglutinative, conjunctive character coupled with the existence of a number of complex graphemes presents a greater challenge for spelling. This supports the need for targeted instruction of complex graphemes in isiXhosa pedagogical practice to improve encoding skills.

Through the use of an initial study and a pre-registered conceptual replication study we examined the relations between decoding, phonological awareness (PA), and spelling for third grade readers of isiXhosa, which uses a consistent alphabetic orthography. The initial exploratory study sought to describe the relationships between decoding and spelling, and PA and spelling in a sample of 49 third grade isiXhosa readers. We then conceptually replicated this study to confirm the hypotheses generated from the initial study with a larger sample of 149 third grade isiXhosa readers. We expected that both decoding and PA would be related to spelling and that the strength of the relationship between decoding and spelling, and PA and spelling would vary with spelling ability, due to the changes that occur in the development of spelling. Cross-sectional, quantitative secondary data was used from two different projects to answer the research questions. Tasks of PA, oral reading fluency (as a measure of decoding) and spelling were developed and administered to the participants. The analysis revealed that decoding was a robust predictor of spelling for third grade isiXhosa readers, whereas PA was not a robust predictor of spelling in isiXhosa, after controlling for decoding. Our study thus confirms the association found between decoding and spelling ability in consistent orthographies using cross-sectional data.

Background: One factor which is consistently highlighted in research on literacy is the lack of understanding of how literacy develops in the Southern-Bantu languages. In particular, little is known about spelling in the Southern-Bantu languages such as isiXhosa.Objectives: Through the use of an initial exploratory study and a conceptual replication study, we examined the relationships between reading, phonological awareness, and spelling in isiXhosa grade 3 learners. The initial exploratory study sought to describe the relationships between reading and spelling, and phonological awareness and spelling in a sample of 49 grade 3 isiXhosa learners. We then conceptually replicated this study with a larger sample of 200 grade 3 isiXhosa learners. We expected that both reading and phonological awareness would be related to spelling and that the strength of the relationship between reading and spelling, and phonological awareness and spelling would vary with spelling ability, due to the changes that occur in the development of spelling.Method: Cross-sectional, quantitative secondary data were used from two different projects to answer the research questions. Tasks of phonological awareness, oral reading fluency and spelling were developed and administered to the participants.Results: We found that reading was a replicable predictor of spelling for grade 3 isiXhosa learners and that phonological awareness was influential only at the mid-range of spelling performance.Conclusion: Our findings emphasise the importance of the reading – writing connection, and lend support for what has been found for other consistently written languages, adding to the growing body of knowledge of universal predictors of spelling development.