Previous studies on English spelling have investigated the types of spelling errors and their frequencies, and studies on why learners made those errors have been called for. This study aimed to identify factors leading to errors in the English-spelling of Korean elementary school students. The factors were investigated by using the following methods: A total of 130 students from O Elementary School were given three types of word-writing tasks: dictation of single words, dictation of short sentences, and writing words as many as the students can based on pictures depicting familiar scenes. The errors in their writing samples were classified into five types. The students were interviewed about why they made those errors. The results showed that the errors were influenced by the factors: the students’ first language, background knowledge, pronunciation, and morphological reasons. The results suggest that if teachers understood these factors, they would be able to explore better teaching methods for reducing errors in English spelling, and that future research could apply these factors for further investigations.

The purpose of this study is to examine phonetically if the spelling errors produced by foreign Korean learners are related to learners’ pronunciation by analyzing the pronunciation of plain, tense, and aspiration sounds of foreign Korean learners using a Praat. A statistical analysis was performed on the listening, reading, and writing data produced by 18 foreign university students at the beginner level. The results are summarized as follows. First, foreign Korean learners accounted for the majority of errors in plain and aspiration sound among initial obstruent words. This can be interpreted as an extremely strong or very weak pronunciation of the word, because learners do not properly recognize the intensity of range in plain sounds. Second, the more accurate the learner’s perception was, the more accurate production can be made. Statistically, it was found that the production rate increased by 0.178 each time the perception rate increased by 1. Therefore, the correlation between perception and production is established. Third, the relationship between pronunciation and spelling is a relationship that increases by 0.652 each time the pronunciation increases by 1. It can be explained that there is a possibility that the learner may often write words as they pronounce them.

This study investigated spelling errors in English stories written by 206 students in an elementary school implementing Korean/English immersion education. Errors were analyzed using crosstab and MANCOVA. Findings are as follows. Spelling errors occurred in 4 categories in order from the most frequent to the least: substitution, omission, addition, and transposition. The error occurrences differed depending on grade level changes: lower grades (Grades 1-3) vs. higher grades (Grades 4-6). The students in both grade levels made more errors in substitution and omission: these error types were significantly decreased as they progressed to the higher grade levels. Errors in addition and transposition showed much fewer occurrences for both grade levels, and these errors did not show a significant decrease because of their rarer occurrences. Overall, the students’ spelling ability increased remarkably as they progressed in grade levels in the immersion environment.

The knowledge of spelling cannot be earned by learning the relations between the sounds and graphemes. However, this study shows that the learners' knowledge is not a mere result of simple memorization. The current study found that the learners’ spelling knowledge is interwoven with their established phonemic inventory and their imperfect knowledge of the target language spelling. Using a learner corpus (KNU English Learner Corpus) constructed from young learners, primary school grades from 4 to 6, enrolled in a gifted English program, we extracted and examined 125 erroneously spelled words each from the basic level and the advanced level subcorpus. Building on Justicia et al. (1999), the error data were classified into six categories and an additional category of morpheme error (MOR) with substitution and omission errors accounting for 76.3% of the total errors. Conducting further analysis, we were able to identify typical cases of the errors and the underlying causes inducing the errors. Generally speaking, the substitution error is found to be due to the variability between grapheme and sound whereas the omission error is often caused by the learners’ tendency to prefer simpler graphemephoneme relations. There also exists considerable intervention of the learners' Korean phonemic inventory, particularly in lower level learners. The findings from this study can be used to provide various specific guides for effective spelling instruction and help learners become more confident about their writing.