Dans le contexte scolaire tunisien, par son impact sur la quasi-totalité des disciplines scolaires, surtout au lycée, la maîtrise du langage français écrit se trouve au centre de l'apprentissage des élèves et constitue un élément-clé de la réussite scolaire. L'orthographe, une composante importante de l'écrit, constitue un redoutable obstacle pour celui qui ne la maîtrise pas. Chercher les causes véritables des difficultés orthographiques des élèves tunisiens et proposer des moyens pour venir en aide aux enseignants et aux apprenants, telle est la démarche, à la fois de critique et d'action, que nous avons adoptée. Le présent travail expose le contexte dans lequel se fait l'enseignement /apprentissage du français en général et de l'orthographe en particulier, analyse les données recueillies, productions écrites des élèves et questionnaires, essaie de dégager les causes du dysfonctionnement et investit les apports des recherches en orthographe pour présenter une modeste suggestion en guise d'une contribution à l'amélioration des compétences orthographiques des élèves tunisiens. Cette étude montre en fin de compte l'importance de prendre en compte la spécificité du contexte tunisien dans l'élaboration des curricula. / In the Tunisian school context, with its impact on almost all academic disciplines, especially in high school, mastering the written French language is central to students learning and is a key component of academic success. The spelling, as an important component of writing, is a fearsome obstacle for those who do not master it. Looking for the true causes of spelling difficulties of Tunisian students and proposing ways to help teachers and learners, this is the approach that we have adapted both for criticism and action. This paper outlines the context in which teaching and learning of French- in general and spelling in particular- are done, analyzes the data, the students' written works and questionnaires, trying to bring out the causes of dysfunction and invests the researches' contributions in spelling to present a modest suggestion by way of a contribution for the improvement of spelling skills of Tunisian students. This study shows ultimately the importance of taking into account the specificity of the Tunisian context in the development of curricula.

This collection of five papers explores the validity of exam accommodations in Ireland, in particular the spelling and grammar waiver, an accommodation unique to Ireland. A review of the literature relating to each accommodation is followed by two papers investigating the validity of the spelling and grammar waiver. A spelling and grammar waiver can be granted to a student with a specific learning disability who attains a standard score of 85 or below on a spelling test. Two groups of students were compared- those who had or had not been granted a waiver, Mock exam scripts of both groups were marked both with and without a spelling and grammar waiver by experienced markers. When a spelling and grammar waiver was applied, the scores of both groups significantly increased. The ‘boost’ received by students who had been granted a waiver was not significantly higher than the ‘boost’ received by the other students, suggesting that the spelling and grammar waiver gives an advantage to all who receive it. Examiner markings were re-examined in a follow up study to investigate possible examiner bias. Results found that elements of the marking scheme, which should not have been affected by a spelling and grammar waiver, were marked more leniently when the examiner marked students’ scripts which had a spelling and grammar waiver applied to it. These studies suggest that the spelling and grammar waiver is not a valid accommodation. In the following study, three spelling tests commonly used by teachers to apply for accommodations were compared. Significant differences were found among the scores. Students scoring below the cut off point for a spelling and grammar waiver ranged from 5.8% to 43.8% depending on the test used. These significant differences in scores across the three tests highlighted the need for an Irish normed spelling test. The final paper details the creation and standardisation of a spelling test in the Republic of Ireland. Limitations to each study and areas of further research are addressed. Suggestions to improve the validity of the spelling and grammar waiver by using an alternative marking scheme and teacher training are discussed.

In this two-part study, English spelling errors of Arabic speaking students are investigated. Specifically, an empirical study is done to document and investigate exactly what kinds of English spelling errors Arabic-speaking students actually make. Then these data are analyzed. and spelling error patterns are discovered. Next. a study is done to determine if the presence of spelling errors in written work has a significant negative effect on readers' evaluations of this writing.

Spelling ability is not static; rather, as children age, learning how to encode morphophonologically complex words in conventional ways is motivated by the increasingly complex demands imposed by academic experiences with morphologically complex words. Success requires ongoing integration of phonological (P), orthographic (O) and morphological (M) knowledge. However, current research on the development and assessment of spelling has not sufficiently accounted for the way word features and participant characteristics interact with students' POM knowledge in the spelling of derived words. This study used a linear mixed effects regression approach to provide new insights about how both word characteristics and students' linguistic knowledge affected the application of POM from grades 3-7 in the spelling of derived forms. Spelling data (WIAT-II) were taken from a larger longitudinal study focused on reading development (Garcia et. al., 2010). Eleven words from the WIAT-II with derivational morphology (which included one inflected form with a derived homophone possibility) were analyzed first with the Phonological Orthographic Morphological Analysis of Spelling (POMAS; an unconstrained scoring system) in order to identify linguistic feature errors within misspellings. Next, misspellings were quantified with the POMplexity metric to evaluate the individual and combined influences of phonology (P), orthography (O), and morphology (M) to derivational misspellings over time. A linear mixed effects regression approach evaluated the impact of item-level characteristics (derivational frequency and shifts), participant characteristics (rime, spelling choice and morphological awareness task scores), and time (grade level) on POMplexity scores. Results indicated item-level characteristics, participant characteristics and time significantly predicted variation in P, O, M, and total POMplexity scores. Frequency had a significant impact on scores, with high frequency words resulting in lower POMplexity scores than low frequency words and these effects were most obvious in grades 3 and 4. Slope differences between words suggested that low frequency misspellings resolve more rapidly than high frequency words. Derivational shift was shown to have a significant interaction with time for O, M and Total scores, but not P scores. In all cases, the slopes for derived words with no shift improved more quickly than shift categories. Finally, performance on measures on the measures of linguistic skill correlated to improved scores for the related POMplexity code. These results strongly suggest that the developmental course of learning to spell derivations is not a linear accumulation of POM knowledge, but instead is a recursive process with both general and word-specific knowledge affecting how an individual student produces a derivational spelling at any given point in time. Contributions of word characteristics, such as frequency and number/type of derivational shift, suggest that morphemic features challenge encoding; that is, increased complexity taxes the system's ability to represent both sound and meaning orthographically. Educational and clinical implications will be described.

This study investigates the type of errors made by middle school heritage learners in written German. The errors are classified into four categories: consonant errors, capitalization errors, vowel errors, and deletions. The study finds that compared to previous research regarding German first-grader spelling, these middle school students produce significantly more errors when writing in German. There are four participants, three female and one male, ranging in age from 10-14, all of whom are enrolled in a Saturday school enrichment class and have been identified as heritage learners prior to class placement. The results indicate a need for more intensive and targeted spelling instruction and a portion of the paper is dedicated to teaching implications. / text

First, this study was conducted to determine the effects of MVRC on the spelling development of second-graders. Second, this study sought to determine if spelling trajectories vary by gender, English Language Learner (ELL) enrollment and/or Special Education (SPED) enrollment. Lastly, students' spelling tests were evaluated with two different spelling scoring methods: traditional standardized scoring, correct and incorrect, and Curriculum-Based Measurement-spelling (CBM), correct letter sequences, to determine which method was more sensitive to growth from pre-test to post-test. Students were pre-tested and post-tested with two measures from the Woodcock-Johnson IV Achievement, Test 3: Spelling and Test 16: Spelling of Sounds. Participants included 159 students, 83 students were enrolled in the experimental condition and 76 students were enrolled in the comparison condition. Using a multilevel model for repeated measures, the researcher estimated the between group-model analyses for Test 3: Spelling and Test 16: Spelling. Students who participated in the experimental condition, receiving MVRC, had significantly different spelling scores than their peers in the comparison group. For Test 3: Spelling, the experimental group increased on average by 1.786 words compared to the comparison group. For Test 16: Spelling of Sounds, the experimental group increased on average by 1.741 words compared to the comparison group. Student spelling trajectories did vary by gender, ELL enrollment, and SPED enrollment. However, these differences were not found to be significant. Neither traditional scoring norCBM-spelling scoring was found to be the more sensitive scoring method for growth for both tests. Instead, CBM-spelling was more sensitive for Test 3: Spelling, while traditional scoring was more sensitive for Test 16: Spelling of Sounds.

General education and special education teachers are expected to provide evidence-based instruction to all students in the classroom. Along with that, they must make sure that their students pass the state mandated tests based on state standards. Meeting the needs of everyone in the classroom is a difficult task especially with 10-20% of those students having special learning needs that require a different approach to assessment and instruction. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role that metacognitive strategies have in second grade students with learning disabilities while they are performing written spelling lists and story generation tasks. One-on-one interviews were conducted with two second grade students with learning disabilities after they had written ten word spelling lists as well as a story based on a photograph of their choice. The interviews were conducted to identify what metacognitive processes they used by asking them to report and reflect on what they wrote, how they knew what to write, and whether or not they could identify what they wrote was correct, as well as being able to independently correct any errors they made. The results indicate that although their metacognitive strategies were emerging, they had difficulty reporting consistently and accurately what spelling strategies they used. They also had difficulty reflecting on whether a word was correct or incorrect and if incorrect, how to correct it. Each student used a different approach to spelling a word, one “Brute Force” and the other “Rule-based.” Neither of these approaches worked effectively for these students as they made many spelling errors and still had difficulty correcting them. The overall findings indicate that these two second grade students with learning disabilities used limited metacognitive strategies of monitoring, regulating and reflecting. What strategies they did employ, were not consistent or effective to help them achieve a level of spelling efficiency needed to be successful in second grade. / Department of Special Education

This thesis describes the analysis of over 1300 spelling and typing errors. It introduces and describes many empirical rules which these errors obey and shows that a vast majority of errors are variations on some 3000 basic forms. It also describes and tests an intelligent, knowledge based spelling error correction algorithm based on the above work. Using the Shorter Oxford English dictionary it correctly identifies over 90% of typical spelling errors and over 80% of all spelling errors, where the correct word is in the dictionary. The methodology used is as follows: An error form is compared with each word in that small portion of the dictionary likely to contain the intended word, but examination of improbable words is rapidly abandoned using heuristic rules. Any differences between the dictionary word and the error form are compared with the basic forms. Any dictionary word which differs from the error form only by one or two basic forms is transferred to a separate list. The program then acts as an expert system where each of the basic forms is a production or rule with a subjective Bayesian probability. A choice is made from the list by calculating the Bayesian probability for each word in the separate list. An interactive spelling error corrector using the concepts and methods developed here is operating on the Bradford University Cyber 170/720 Computer, and was used to correct this thesis. The corrector also runs on VAX and Prime computers.

Historical texts are an important resource for researchers in the humanities. However, standard NLP tools typically perform poorly on them, mainly due to the spelling variations present in such texts. One possible solution is to normalise the spelling variations to equivalent contemporary word forms before using standard tools. Weighted edit distance has previously been used for such normalisation, improving over the results of algorithms based on standard edit distance. Aligned training data is needed to extract weights, but there is a lack of such data. An unsupervised method for extracting edit distance weights is therefore desirable. This thesis presents a multilingual evaluation of an unsupervised method for extracting edit distance weights for normalisation of historical spelling variations. The model is evaluated for English, German, Hungarian, Icelandic and Swedish. The results are mixed and show a high variance depending on the different data sets. The method generally performs better than normalisation basedon standard edit distance but as expected does not quite reach up to the results of a model trained on aligned data. The results show an increase in normalisation accuracy compared to standard edit distance normalisation for all languages except German, which shows a slightly reduced accuracy, and Swedish, which shows similar results to the standard edit distance normalisation.

The problem of this study was an analysis of major spelling deficiencies among collegiate business students. The purposes were as follows: (1) to develop a diagnostic instrument that will measure spelling deficiencies; and (2) to make recommendations regarding the preparation of materials that will assist students in overcoming these deficiencies. Written assignments prepared by collegiate Business Communication students were examined for spelling errors. Errors were then classified into the following categories: (1) words with "ie" and "ei" ; (2) final "e"; (3) final consonant rule; (4) final "y"; (5) confusion over vowel sounds; (6) pronunciation problems; (7) sound-alikes; (8) plurals; (9) apostrophes; (10) omissions; (11) additions and repetitions; (12) substitutions; (13) demons; and (14) miscellaneous. Percentages of total errors served as a guideline for preparation of a Table of Specifications, and a Spelling Diagnostic Test was developed. Validity of the instrument was determined by a panel of experts. The test was then administered to 214 collegiate business students, and a reliability coefficient of .83 was determined using the split-half method.