Turkish spelling errors by Turkish-Dutch bilingual children

Abstract

The current pilot study adds to the small body of work focusing on Turkish-Dutch children's Turkish literacy attainment by investigating their spelling errors. This study deviates from the previous studies by attempting to find patterns behind the surface representation of errors (i.e. omission, substitution and addition). Fifty-three 10 to 12 year-old Turkish-Dutch bilingual children were asked to write Turkish narratives. The participants misspelled about half of the words. The errors in order of frequency were diacritic errors (i.e. confusing the graphemes with and without diacritics), orthographic ambiguity errors (i.e. phonetically spelling a word though it is not orthographically transparent), punctuation errors, capitalization errors, morphological errors (e.g. using a wrong allomorph of a suffix), spacing errors (e.g. writing two words as one), code-switching (i.e. utilizing Dutch words in Turkish sentences) and Dutch-influenced errors (i.e. using Dutch orthographic rules in Turkish such as spelling /j/ as <j> or /u/ as <oe>). The rest of the errors, which lacked a discernible pattern, were categorized as “other”. These results differed from the findings on Turkish monolingual children's spelling errors in the literature in some notable ways (e.g. the very high rate of misspelled words and the prevalence of diacritic errors).