L2 Users and English Spelling

Abstract

This paper compares the spelling of adult L2 users of English with native L1 users,both children and adults, using data from the 1993 NFER survey of L1 children, from the 1980 Wing and Baddeley corpus, from a UK university EFL test for overseas students and from work by overseas students in England.An overallcomparison showed similar error rates in L1 children and L2 adults and a similar distribution of errors both for L1 adults and children and for L2 users across the familiar categories of letter insertion, omission, substitution and transposition, apart from a lower proportion of omission errors for L2 users. More detailed comparisons found that, while some errors were particular to certain groups, such as <l>, <r> and epenthetic <e> for Japanese, others were common with all users, such as consonant doubling, vowels representing schwa and digraph reversals <hg>. Much of the errors reflect problems with sound/letter correspondences, some with individual words such as because. Yet overall L2 users can perform at a levelequivalentto a 15-year-old child,unlike mostother areas of language.