Natalia Peralta

Dr. Ingman

EDUC X 426. 1

1 November 2020

Analyzing Students’ Spelling

There are three writing samples in this analysis from 7th grade students. They attend the

same school in California. It is a public school with a highly diverse population. The state has

three English language proficiency levels: Emerging, Expanding, and Bridging. The assignment

is an essay on the novel The Outsiders. I took as an example the first page of each. The focus of

this analysis is to see the spelling in different linguistic backgrounds based on Gentry’s Five-

Stage Model of Spelling Development. According to Tompkins's article, “This model delineates

the strategies that students use as they learn about English orthography” (13). To get the results, I

counted the number of spelling errors and conventional spelling found in each sample.

Student #1 - (Sample attached)

This student is from India, and his first language is Hindi. He is in 7th grade. He is taking

ELA in his school and is taking all the assignments in English. He is in the Expanding level. He

has 34 words in the conventional spelling stage. Thirty-six words are in the phonetics stage, and

two are precommunicative spellings. It is interesting to see the symbol in the two

precommunicative mistakes, as they show the influence of his first language.

Student # 2 (Sample Attached)

This student is from México. She is new to the United States. Her first language is

Spanish. She is in 7th grade. She is taking ELA in her school and is taking all the assignments in

English. She is in the Emerging level. In addition to ELA, she also takes a separate ELD class.

She has three transitional spelling errors and 42 conventional words. The spelling errors show

the influence of her native language. Adding vowels, like in breake/break, the location of the h,

like in whit/with, adding s, like in differents/different are common errors of Spanish-speaking

learners. It seems that she doesn’t have a lot of errors, but it is because she doesn’t have enough

English to write enough. She used “safe writing strategies” in her essay, like copying strategies

(15).

Student # 3 (Sample Attached)

This student is from the United States. Her family is from México. She speaks Spanish

with her family, and some of her relatives speak fluent English. She is in 7th grade. She is in the

Bridging level. She has 77 conventional spelling, 4 transitional, and 4 phonetic spelling errors.

The influence of the Spanish language is noticeable in combinations like ei in Freindship/

friendship, adding vowels like in gange/gang, the location of the h and the absence of the

apostrophe, like in whouldnt/wouldn’t, and the presence of phonetic errors like fallowed/

followed, ether/either, and basicly/basically.

Analysis of the Five Stages of Spelling Development

Stage Hindi Spanish English

Conventional 34 42 77

Transitional 3 4

Phonetic 36 4

Semiphonetic

Precommunicative 2

Reflection

The Tompkins article was useful to understand the language stage of some of the students

and to see how the first language influences English learning. However, it is difficult to identify

the language stage of the students that are new to the language because they control the language

they use. So, in this analysis, the second student shows that she is in the conventional stage like

the third student, but the second student used safe writing strategies when she wrote her essay, so

we can not be sure that she is in the conventional stage based on this evidence.

I found this to be an interesting exercise. It was remarkable to see how the first student

still used a symbol of his first language. One question I have is how much time does a student

that is in an immersion environment need to pass from the precommunicative to a conventional

stage based on the first language? Finally, I couldn’t analyze the difference in spelling based on

socioeconomic background because I don’t have that information.

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