Abstract:

In recent years, Dutch spelling education in Flemish and Dutch secondary education (SE) as well as tertiary education (TE) has been the subject of much debate. Research by Devos and Van Vooren (2010) into the spelling knowledge of students in SE (n=359) suggests that their knowledge falls short of the final attainment targets. Additional research now tries to capture the reasons underlying this trend, not only by focusing on student cognition (Devos and Van Vooren, 2015) but also on teacher cognition (Devos and Van Vooren, 2014) as an ‘understudied’ aspect of language teaching (Borg, 2012, 2015). With this study, we want to fill this void by assessing what teachers think, know and believe regarding specific aspects of spelling.

More specifically, the perception of spelling errors by (practising) teachers in SE (n=274) versus a control group (n=89) will be compared. In particular, we will focus on Flemish (n=138) and Dutch teachers (n=136) and a control group of Flemish (n=48) and Dutch (n=41) ‘ordinary language users’. Additionally, a distinction is made between (L1 and L2) language teachers (n=123) and non-language teachers (n=151). The study is two-pronged: it contains (1) an evaluation of 10 rule-related (e.g. dt) and memory-related (e.g. ei/ij) errors (rated on a Likert-scale 1-100) and (2) an evaluation of their attitude tested by 10 statements (rated on a Likert-scale 1-5). These statements focus on the perception of spelling errors.

We will assess whether there are any statistically significant discrepancies in the perception of spelling errors between the two groups, and we will relate these results to the relevant literature. The main result of this study is that there is a significant Pearson correlation (p=0.000) between the above mentioned questions (1) and (2). In view of this, some important results for the relation between teacher cognition and teachers' classroom practices will be focused on, alongside the impact these results have for teacher educators and curriculum managers.

References:
[1] Borg, Simon (2012), Current approaches to language teacher cognition research: A methodological analysis. In: R. Barnard and A. Burns (eds.), Researching language teacher cognition and practice: International case studies. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 11-29.
[2] Borg, Simon (2015), Teacher Cognition and Language Education. Research and Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
[3] Devos, Filip and Valerie Van Vooren (2010), Een correlatief onderzoek naar de kennis van spelling bij laatstejaarsleerlingen ASO en VWO [A correlative study on last year secundary students’ spelling knowledge]. In: Logopedie, 23-3, pp. 63-68.
[4] Devos, Filip and Valerie Van Vooren (2014), Teachers’ attitudes towards (the alignment between) grammar in the L1 language curriculum of primary and secondary education. In: ICERI 2014 Proceedings CD. Sevilla: IATED, pp. 5642-5651.
[5] Devos, Filip and Valerie Van Vooren (2015), A correlative study on language and non-language students’ metacognitive aspects of spelling. In: INTED 2015 Proceedings CD. Madrid: IATED, pp. 2798-2803.

Keywords:

Spelling knowledge, spelling attitude, teacher cognition, metacognitive awareness, secundary education.