The initial development of spelling in Spanish: From global to analytical

Abstract

During a school year, samples of words written by three groups of children of successive ages were collected. Two groups of children were in first and second year of Kindergarten (4 and 5 years of age), when alphabetic rules were not taught in a systematic way. The third group was in first year of Primary School (6 years of age), and was being taught to read and spell in a systematic way. After classifying the words written by the children, seven categories of spelling were obtained, which may represent different stages in their learning process. Their analysis showed that they are related to different types of knowledge and processes, mainly phonological ones. The results show that the development of spelling in Spanish does not qualitatively differ from that of children who learn to spell in opaque writing systems. The differences mainly involve the time it takes to learn, and the rate of acquisition.The developmental models of spelling acquisition that have been put forward over the last two decades (Ehri) share three main features: (i) they are suprime, especially based on the analysis of the errors children make when trying to spell new words, (ii) they are theories that describe the stages of the spelling development and (iii) they mainly focus on the phonological skills of children, although they admit the importance of orthographic knowledge (Ellis, 1994).These models and the empirical work derived from them have given rise to the acceptance of three major stages that children progressively go through when they are learning how to spell. The first stage is basically pre-communicative. The children represent words based on their visual features (a logographic procedure), and still do not relate sounds and letters in words. After this stage, the process of acquiring the alphabetic principle begins. The children learn the phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules (PGCs from now on). Finally, once the code is mastered, the children reach the last stage, where their spelling is orthographically Reading and Writing (2005) 18:81-98 Ó Springer 2005

The influences of language of literacy instruction and vocabulary on the spelling of Spanish–English bilinguals

“…However, the degree of orthographic transparency of a language may play an important mediating role in determining the rate of learning to spell. For example, Defior and Serrano (2005) found that Spanish monolinguals' spelling development did not differ qualitatively from that of children learning languages with more opaque orthographies like English, but that the age of acquisition appeared to be earlier and the rate at which spelling development occurred appeared faster.…”

“…Although, the spelling development of English speakers has been extensively studied (e.g., Templeton & Morris, 2000), and the spelling development of Spanish speakers has been the subject of some research (e.g., Defior & Serrano, 2005), relatively little is known about the English spelling development of Spanish-English bilinguals -children exposed to more than one language and more than one orthographic system. Spanish-English biliterates need to differentiate two spelling systems, a deep orthography (English) and a relatively shallow, transparent orthography (Spanish).…”

A study of writing mechanisms in Spanish primary education children / Estudio de los mecanismos de escritura en niños españoles de Educación Primaria

“…Estudios en castellano sugieren que el uso del conocimiento léxico y la automaticidad de la escritura se produce antes en castellano que en francés, en torno a un año antes (Jiménez et al, 2008;Alegría & Carrillo, 2014;Defior & Serrano, 2005) posiblemente por la transparencia del sistema ortográfico castellano, pues la exactitud favorecería la formación de las representaciones ortográficas como sugiere la teoría del selfteaching (Share, 1999).…”

“…Al igual que en los sistemas ortográficos más opacos, los estudios evolutivos en castellano sugieren que los niños también desarrollan dos mecanismos para escribir (Carrillo, Alegría, & Marín, 2013;Defior & Serrano, 2005;Valle-Arroyo, 1989), con predominancia de una escritura subléxica en los niños que tienen poca práctica con la escritura. En este sentido, se ha demostrado que los niños más pequeños cometen mayor número de errores en las palabras largas, un supuesto indicador del uso de un procesamiento subléxico (Sánchez, Diuk, Borzone, & Ferroni, 2009;Valle-Arroyo, 1989).…”

Reading and spelling development in Persian from grade 1 to grade 4

“…Although a growing number of cross-orthographic comparisons have examined the effects of inconsistencies on children's performance (e.g., Defior, Martos & Cary, 2002;Goswami, Propodas, & Wheelwright, 1997;Seymour, et al, 2003;Thorstad, 991;Wimmer & Goswami, 1994;Defior & Serrano, 2005), less research has examined the effects of inconsistencies on children's performance within an orthographic system.…”