Young ESL Learners’ Knowledge of Spelling Consonant Clusters: A Case Study
Kurniasih
University of Islam Malang
Abstract
This present study examines spelling knowledge of consonant clusters of Grade II and III and their current stage of spelling development. The subjects of this study are second and third graders of Andhra MahilaSabha, LabSchool, OsmaniaUniversity, Hyderabad-India. Thirty words have been chosen for this study and were divided into five words categories, such as onset, coda, doublet, silent letters, and rhyming words. Production task was used in data collection. The study found that third graders are always better than second graders. Grade III students perform well in all the five categories. For both the grades, onset is the easiest word category, while silent letters word category is the most difficult overall. Omission errors of silent letters is the most common error occur in both grades. They tended to drop silent letter win the word wrong and wrist, they do not know that r is preceded by w, because it is not pronounced so, they do not write it. This means that children in both grades still depend on the phonological cues. Thus, they are still in the phonological stage. Then, substitution errors are mostly occurs in doublet word category. They are able to spell the two identical words correctly, but they substitute vowels representations as they were pronounced, as butten for button. Those findings reveal that they are in orthographic stage with little influence form phonological cues.
Keywords: young learners, consonant cluster
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YOUNG ESL LEARNERS’ KNOWLEDGE OF SPELLING CONSONANT CLUSTER
