Spelling Error Analysis of Arab Learners of Persian Language

Spelling is one of important skills of the second language learning, which deserves to be considered due to its importance and its impact on reading and writing skills. However, this language aspect has been less considered by educational planners and teachers. Learning spelling is a completely systematic process that is influenced by learners’ knowledge on different aspects of language (including phonological, morphological and orthographic knowledge). Through investigating the spelling errors of Persian learners, it is possible to achieve their real understanding from the second language structure at each stage of their linguistic development. Thus findings of such research are useful for teachers, curriculum and textbook designers who are eager to identify problematic areas for Persian spelling learners. The data of present research help them find in which linguistic aspect of spelling, their learners need more training.
The significance of this issue and the lack of literature in this field have led the authors of the present paper to analyze the spelling errors of Arab learners of Persian language by using contrastive and error analysis approaches. The data collected from 105 of learners’ intermediate and final spelling tests in three levels of beginner, intermediate, and advanced. The population of the present research has been selected by simple random sampling among Farsi-learners at Jam’at-al-Mostafa-al-Alameyyeh , Ghom branch. Regarding errors’ sources, the data obtained divided into three groups of intralingual, interlingual and ambiguous and based on their category, they are classified as consonantal, vowel and form errors. The results indicate that categorically, the errors related to vowel system have the highest frequency (47%) and there aren’t much differences between consonantal (26/8%) and form (26/4%) errors. Also according to the source of errors, the inter lingual errors with the source of mother tongue with 56% have the maximum frequency and ambiguous and intra lingual errors are in the second and third places (26% and 18% respectively) (table 1). Therefore, it can be said that the most important source of spelling errors of Arab learners of Persian is the interference of learners’ mother language on Persian spelling learning. These kinds of errors are resulted from trivial differences between Arabic and Persian phonemic systems. This matter confirms with the moderate version of contrastive analysis.