Spelling Errors in French Elementary School Students: A Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

Purpose: This study offers the first description of misspellings across elementary school using the Phonological, Orthographic and Morphological Assessment of Spelling (POMAS), a linguistic framework based on Triple Word Form theory, adapted for French (POMAS-FR). It aims to test the “universality” of POMAS and its suitability to track development in French spelling. Method: One hundred ninety-four typically developing French children (Grades 1–5) produced a written narrative and words-to-dictation. These were analyzed for productivity and accuracy. Misspellings were then analyzed using POMAS-FR. Results: Productivity and accuracy were better in the later grades. POMAS-FR provided a novel framework for tracking error types in our French sample. The data showed a linear trend for text production, whereby the proportion of phonological errors decreased rapidly in the early grades, while orthographic errors decreased and morphological errors increased throughout elementary school. Words-to-dictation showed a more stable pattern, with a steady decrease in phonological errors, and a stable proportion of orthographic and morphological errors. The specific error types found within each linguistic category are described for both tasks. Conclusions: The POMAS-FR allowed for the characterization of linguistic knowledge involved in learning to spell French across elementary school. Interplays between different types of linguistic knowledge were evident at all grades. In comparison with other writing systems, French text spelling competence relied heavily on morphological knowledge. These results suggest POMAS may be applied to other orthographic systems. It also highlights the importance of task and word selection for the qualitative evaluation of spelling. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.20520774

Planning and Assessing Word Production to Support Lexical Spelling Learning in Grade 1

“…These data should be enriched by students' verbalizations to make it easier to better understand the choices they made. Lastly, as in other studies (Godin et al, 2018;Plisson et al, 2013), there were very few "inversion" errors even though this type of error was frequently observed in Grade 1 (Joye et al, 2022). This low rate seems to be an indicator of appropriate handling of phonological information.…”

“…This range of non-standard orthographic forms highlights how important it is for teachers to know the French spelling system so that they can properly interpret what is written, as well as how important it is for students to acquire not only phonological and orthographic skills but also morphological skills in order to produce words in Grade 1. As in the study by Joye et al (2022), it was also demonstrated that orthographic variations are predominant in first grade. They result in numerous substitutions (confusion with another grapheme) that can reflect a plausible choice of grapheme (en instead of an) or a simpler choice (o instead of au).…”

“…These spelling productions can also be surprising given students' different reactions to words that are similar to each other and share the same fragility areas. The variance in the results reflects not only a known difficulty related to silent letters (Joye et al, 2022;Peereman et al, 2007), but especially the problems that students face in transferring their knowledge about one word to another one with similar characteristics. A larger corpus of words including these fragility areas would be needed to better verify this knowledge transfer question.…”

“…They were able to deal with multigraphemic phonemes (in and an) (Catach, 2005;Daigle & Montésinos-Gelet, 2013) and select the most plausible spellings in the context of the words that were dictated. As demonstrated by some studies (Joye et al, 2022;Sprenger-Charolles et al,1998), graphemic complexity has only a temporary impact on spelling productions, but it gives rise to difficulties during the very early stages of learning. The students were also confronted with words containing final silent letters.…”

“…Various studies have also analyzed the errors of French-speaking students. For instance, Joye et al (2022) have described and compared spelling mistakes made by students in grades 1 to 5 of elementary school. Godin et al (2018) repeated this same exercise among students with or without developmental language disorder (DLD) in Grade 2 of elementary school.…”