The focus of this study is on spelling profiles of children learning Asian languages that vary in terms of their writing systems, representing three major types of systems. Much of what is known about early spelling skills is based on English and other alphabetic languages, and an extension to a greater variety of writing systems is yet to be established. Reading has received the lion’s share of the research focus, with much less attention paid to spelling. Because of this, the development of literacy proficiency is a key concern for educators, and research into children’s acquisition of said skills is extensive. Literacy skills are essential for academic and occupational success. The implications are that different scripts present different challenges for young learners. Results indicate group differences in the proportions of error types, with more overall errors for Tamil, more phonological errors for Malay, and more irrelevant or non-sense words for Chinese. They completed a spelling to dictation task in their Asian language, with ten words taken from the grade level curriculum per language. Five hundred and sixty-eight Grade 1, 6-year-old children participated, with 128 English + Malay, 119 English + Tamil, and 321 English + Chinese children in each bilingual group. We utilized an error coding scheme based on triple-code theory to enumerate the occurrence of phonological, orthographic (graphemic), and morphological (semantic) types of spelling errors across the three language groups. These sets of scripts vary in how speech is mapped to print. In this study, we extend spelling error analysis to groups of biliterate children learning two scripts, which include English plus either: (a) another Latin-script alphabet with a shallow orthography (Malay) (b) a transparent alphasyllabary using akshara (Tamil) or (c) a non-alphabetic, morphosyllabic script using simplified hanzi characters (Mandarin Chinese). However, different sets of skills and strategies may contribute to spelling across types of orthographies. Previous work on spelling error analysis for English provides insight into the sets of knowledge and cognitive processes required for children to perform the task, and their different strategies across development. Spelling is an important aspect of the construct of literacy, and is more difficult to acquire than reading. The literacy component of writing is less researched than that of reading, even though it holds equal significance for modern success. The importance of literacy in academics and the predominantly digital world cannot be understated.
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