Phonological and orthographic knowledge: an Arab-Emirati perspective

Abstract

This paper analyses the misspellings of a group of first year male Arab-Emirati college students from the phonological and orthographical point of view. Based on a list of 80 words, the problems inherent in their spelling are triangulated using three methods of testing – a word dictation test (WD), a reading aloud test (RA) and a multiple choice test (MC). Through an analysis of the corpus gathered, the misspellings may result from four broad categories of challenge – first language phonological interference, the differing English-Arabic scriptal structure, the irregularity of the English orthographical system and the dual route theory of lexical access. In particular the paper looks at the effects of vowel substitution and consonant errors. The paper then discusses the pedagogical implications of the findings.