A Multilinguistic Approach to Evaluating Student Spelling in Writing Samples

Abstract

The language expertise of speech-language pathologists enables them to readily evaluate the phonological, orthographic, and morphological errors in student misspellings, in order to identify specific underlying linguistic deficits and plan targeted interventions. The error classification system provides speech-language pathologists with a tool that is both simple and time efficient and, thus, may help increase their confidence and ability in addressing the spelling needs of students.

A multilinguistic analysis of spelling among children with cochlear implants

“…The POMplexity for Roots and Affixes (Quick & Erickson, 2018) is an informal spelling assessment for examining underlying linguistic strengths and weaknesses that children bring to the task of spelling. Misspelled words are first divided into morphemes.…”

“…In addition, the U-score was determined for each word, which is an indicator of the frequency and dispersion of the word in written English (Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995). Finally, each misspelled word was analyzed using the POMplexity for Roots and Affixes (Quick & Erickson, 2018).…”

“…Finally, morphological errors were categorized as: morphologically plausible (i.e., minor errors demonstrating awareness of the target morpheme; "makeing" for "making"), homophone substitution (e.g., "write" for "right"), morpheme substitution (e.g., "plant" for "planet"), non-morpheme substitution (e.g., "burd" for "bird"), or omission (e.g., "walk" for "walked"). Further details regarding administration and scoring can be found elsewhere (Quick & Erickson, 2018). Appendix A provides examples of phonological, orthographic and morphological errors for both roots and affixes.…”

A Multilinguistic Spelling Analysis of Children who are Hard of Hearing

“…There are several spelling error analytic approaches that are informed by a multilinguistic understanding of spelling, including Multiple Linguistic Coding (MLC; Apel & Masterson, 2001;Bowers et al, 2014), Spelling Sensitivity Score (SSS; Masterson & Apel, 2010b), The Phonological, Orthographic, and Morphological Assessment of Spelling (Bahr et al, 2012;Silliman et al, 2006), POMplexity (Bahr et al, 2020;Benson-Goldberg, 2014), and POMplexity for Roots and Affixes (Quick & Erickson, 2018;Quick et al, 2019). All of these tools infer children's linguistic knowledge or strategies from their spelling errors (Devonshire & Fluck, 2010), but they vary in their approach.…”

“…The POMplexity for Roots and Affixes is the only error analysis approach that concurrently describes the phonological, orthographic, and morphological linguistic features for each morpheme of a misspelled word. Given that children who are HH may have weaknesses in all three domains, this unique feature of the POMplexity for Roots and Affixes allows for patterns of strengths and weaknesses to be compared across linguistic domains (Quick & Erickson, 2018).…”