The most frequent spelling errors in the writings of Spanish heritage learners

Despite the fact that Spanish Heritage Language Learners (SHLs) have many difficulties with spelling, the development of spelling proficiency has not received much attention in HL research, so far. One exception to this is Dr. Sara Beaudrie, a professor of Spanish Linguistics at Arizona State University, where she also serves as the coordinator of the Spanish heritage program. In 2012, she published a description of the most common orthographic errors of HLs, based on writing samples obtained from 100 college students.

Beaudrie found that the great majority of misspellings involving consonants were the result of overusing the letter ‘s’, which was used in place of either ‘c’ or ‘z’, as in hise, vacasiones, tristesa and empesar. Less common, but still very frequent, were the opposite cases, that is, the use of c and z instead of s, as in demaciado and riza.  Other errors in the spelling of consonants involved h, b/v, r/rr, j/g, and y/ll. None of these errors will surprise the SHL instructor, who is probably seeing them constantly in their students’ work. However, one of the most important contributions of Sara Beaudrie’s study is that it identifies the words and word types where the bulk of spelling errors fall:

1. More than half of the errors consisting in the overuse of ‘s’ were found in these groups:

• verbs ending in -zar (such as empezar, alcanzar) and their forms.
• the word vez
• the verb hacer and its forms.

2. Almost all ‘h’ misspellings (91%) were found in only six words (and their variations):

• haber
• hacer
• ir
• hasta
• a
• era

3. More than half of misspellings involving b/v were found in only four groups of words:

• verbs in the imperfect tense (-ava for –aba)
• forms of haber
• forms of deber
• the preterit of estar (estub- for estuv-)

Targeting instruction to these specific set of errors will most likely produce a quicker result in eliminating spelling errors from students’ essays—some sort of jump-start for spelling development.

Source: Beaudrie, S. (2012). A corpus-based study on the misspellings of Spanish heritage learners and their implications for teaching. Linguistics and Education, 23, 135-44. 

---