The parlous state in which the English language finds itself in South Africa, both in its written and speech forms, is the cause ot grave concern to most English-speaking citizens, and to many Afrikaans-speaking people as well. This is the case not only in the commercial world and the civll service, but also in the schools and universities, and in fact in most walks of life. Although we are conscious of this state of affairs, and can quote many examples of the poor quality of English used, we have no measuring device through which we can assess exactly how bad the language used by any given group of people is. It is not possible to compare the performance in English of a certain school with standard English and to express the result as a percentage score. The aim of this investigation was to find out how well, or how badly, South African school children spell, and to compare the performances of English- and Afrikaansspeaking pupils. It was felt that the results would provide some concrete evidence and fairly accurate data which could be used to assess the standard of English spelling in our schools, and to pinpoint some of the major weaknesses. The writer hoped, thus, that the investigation might be of some practical usefulness to teachers of English spelling, and as spelling is basic to the written word and to some extent to the spoken word, it might make some small contribution to the drive towards better English in South African schools.

No description available.

This study presents an efficacy evaluation of language arts instruction in the Fort Worth, Texas elementary schools.

The goal of this diploma thesis is to create system for network data diagnostics based on detecting and correcting spelling errors. The system is intended to be used by network administrators as next diagnostics tool. As opposed to the primary use of detection and correction spelling error in common text, these methods are applied to network data, which are given by the user. Created system works with NetFlow data, pcap files or log files. Context is modeled with different created data categories. Dictionaries are used to verify the correctness of words, where each category uses its own. Finding a correction only according to the edit distance leads to many results and therefore a heuristic for evaluating candidates was proposed for selecting the right candidate. The created system was tested in terms of functionality and performance.

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.

No description available.

No description available.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate how five Swedish teachers relates to the spelling education in grade 1 and 3. The material of this study consists of texts from students from grade 1 and interviews with 5 teachers in the Stockholm area. The study originates from the sociocultural theory and the zone of proximate development as well as a grammatical theory which consists of a phonology part and a morphology part. The result of this study shows that the teachers are positive to teach spelling and specific rules in grade 3 in general. The study also shows that the teachers doesn’t correct the student’s texts that much in grade 1 but they do in grade 3, because most students have learned how to write and spell better in grade 3. The study also shows that the most common spelling mistakes is double letters and vowel confusions. Further would the teachers focus on double letters and special spellings, as th eSwedish/ɧ/ sound for example while correcting the student’s texts.

The literature on spelling and spelling development suggests there is a strong relationship between spelling and phonology (Bruck & Treiman, 1990; Caravolas, Hulme & Snowling, 2001; Craig, 2006; Gindri, Keske-Soares & Mota, 2007). Spelling, however, is considerably less researched than reading (Caravolas, Humle & Snowling, 2001). Spelling difficulties are known to be more persistent in people with reading and writing disabilities, even when their reading has become acceptable (Høien & Lundberg, 1999) but more research is needed in this area. Assessment and detailed knowledge of the difficulties is of great importance in order to provide the appropriate help for children with reading and writing disabilities (Frisk, 2010; Magnusson, Nauclér, & Reuterskiöld, 2008). The purpose of the present study was to develop and try out a phonologically based spelling test for children, with focus on medial phonemes. The study contained 150 pupils in grade 1 and 2 as well as pupils in remedial teaching due to reading and spelling difficulties in the same grades. In addition to spelling, all pupils were tested for reading ability, phonological awareness, nonverbal intelligence and auditory discrimination. Misspellings were analysed with three quantitative and one qualitative classification methods. Results showed that the spelling test based on analyse of medial phonemes captured misspellings to the same extent as the other quantitative classification method.  Pupils in grade 2 received significant higher results in the spelling test than pupils in grade 1. The group of typically developed pupils had significantly better results than the pupils with reading and writing disabilities. Results also showed that real words were significantly easier to spell than non-words. Moreover, significant correlations between spelling and reading ability, and spelling and phonological awareness, were found. The strong correlation between spelling ability and phonological awareness, and the fact that children with reading and writing disabilities performed poorly on spelling of non-words, lead to the conclusion that spelling and phonology are closely related, which is supported by the literature (Bruck & Treiman, 1990; Caravolas, Hulme & Snowling, 2001; Craig, 2006; Gindri, Keske-Soares & Mota, 2007).

Σκοπός της παρούσας εργασίας ήταν να μελετήσει την ορθογραφική απόδοση κλιτικών μορφημάτων ουσιαστικών, ρημάτων και επιθέτων της ελληνικής γλώσσας από μαθητές ηλικίας 9 έως 11 ετών. Στη μελέτη συμμετείχαν τρεις ομάδες μαθητών: 21 μαθητές Στ΄ δημοτικού με αναγνωστικές και ορθογραφικές δυσκολίες, 21 μαθητές ίδιας χρονολογικής ηλικίας και 24 μαθητές παρόμοιου αναγνωστικού και ορθογραφικού επιπέδου νεότερης ηλικίας. Αρχικά, χορηγήθηκε στους μαθητές όλων των ομάδων ένα σύνολο δοκιμασιών, οι οποίες αξιολογούσαν τη μη λεκτική τους νοημοσύνη, τη βραχύχρονη μνήμη τους, τις αναγνωστικές και ορθογραφικές τους δεξιότητες. Η πειραματική ορθογραφική δοκιμασία συνίστατο στην ορθογραφική απόδοση ουσιαστικών, επιθέτων και ρημάτων ενσωματωμένων σε κατάλληλα προτασιακά πλαίσια. Σύμφωνα με τα αποτελέσματα, οι μαθητές με αναγνωστικές και ορθογραφικές δυσκολίες ήταν λιγότερο ακριβείς και συνεπείς στην ορθογραφική απόδοση των κλιτικών μορφημάτων των λέξεων συγκριτικά με τους μαθητές τυπικής ανάπτυξης της Στ΄ τάξης δημοτικού. Οι μαθητές με αναγνωστικές και ορθογραφικές δυσκολίες είχαν παρόμοια επίδοση με αυτή των νεαρότερων μαθητών παρόμοιου αναγνωστικού και ορθογραφικού επιπέδου ως προς την ορθογραφική ακρίβεια και την ορθογραφική συνέπεια στην απόδοση των κλιτικών μορφημάτων. Υπήρξαν βέβαια και κάποιες περιπτώσεις, όπου δεν υπήρξαν διαφοροποιήσεις μεταξύ των ομάδων. Επιπλέον, oι μαθητές και των τριών ομάδων είχαν καλύτερη επίδοση στην ορθογραφική απόδοση των κλιτικών μορφημάτων των ουσιαστικών και των ρημάτων σε σχέση με αυτήν στα κλιτικά μορφήματα των επιθέτων. / The purpose of this study was to examine the spelling of noun's, verb's and adjectives' inflectional morphemes in the Greek language by 9–11-year old children. Three groups participated in this study. Particularly, 21 sixth graders with reading and spelling difficulties, 21 chronological age-matched children and 24 younger reading and spelling-level-matched children. At first, students were assessed on a range of tests of non verbal ability, short-memory abilities, as well as reading and spelling abilities. In the experimental spelling task they were asked to spell nouns, verbs and adjectives in dictated sentences. Children with reading and spelling difficulties were less accurate and less consistent than chronological age-matched children in spelling inflectional morphemes. Moreover, children with reading and spelling difficulties performed similarly to younger reading and spelling-level-matched children as far as spelling accuracy and spelling consistency of inflections are concerned. In some cases of inflectional morphemes the three groups did not differ. Finally, children spelled noun and verb inflections more accurately than adjective inflections.