SPELLING MORPHEMES IN SINGAPOREAN BILINGUALS : IMPLICATIONS FOR MODELS OF SPELLING DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Frith's (1985) Stage model is commonly used to characterise literacy development in American and British monolingual English-speaking children. These children are usually taught to read and write using a phonic method whereas the whole word method is prevalent in Singapore schools for English. The universality of the Stage Model, given different classroom instruction, was questioned and investigated in this study by testing the spelling skills of 83 English speaking bilingual Primary 3 pupils. Pupils were selected using a Language Background Questionnaire and based on their responses, they were divided into three Language Background (LB) groups: Chinese-LB, English-LB and Malay-LB. They were tested with a specially designed Morphology Spelling Test which consisted of stem verbs and their corresponding past and progressive verb forms. Verb regularity and word frequency were nested within the stem verbs. The results of the Morphology Spelling Test, confirmed that the Stage Model is not applicable in Singapore and that a modified version of Seymour's (1993) Dual Foundation Model provides a better account. The modified Dual Foundation Model accomodates different processing strategies of the three language background groups: the Chinese-LB rely more on a visual spelling strategy, the Malay-LB rely more on a phonological strategy, and the English­ LB rely on both these strategies. These differences across Language Background groups suggest that teaching strategy and language background jointly influence the course of literacy development. The limitations of this study, implications for teaching and directions for future research are also discussed.