Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Chinese: omission of consonants ‘subjet’; addition of 
e ‘boyes’.
Dutch: double 
kk ‘wekk’.
French: wrong double consonants ‘comming ‘; vowel substitution ‘definetely’.
German: omission of 
a ‘h’ppened’; substitution of i for e ‘injoid’.
Unique: ‘telephon’.
Greek: consonant substitution, 
d/t ‘Grade Britain’; double unnecessarily
‘sattisfaction’; transposition ‘sceince’. Unique 
c for g ‘Creek’ (Greek).
Italian: consonant omission ‘wether’ (whether); failure to double ‘biger’.
Japanese: consonant substitution ‘gramatikal’; epenthetic vowels ‘difficulity’;
CV transposition ‘prospretiy’. Unique 
l and r ‘grobal’.
Korean: consonant omission ‘fators’; lack of doubling ‘poluted’; omitted vowels
‘therefor’.
Spanish: consonant omission ‘wich’; lack of doubling ‘til’; unnecessary doubling
‘exclussive’.
Urdu: vowel omission ‘somtimes’ and final 
d and t ‘woul’, ‘lef’.
Box 5.7 Spelling and L2 learning
●
The English spelling system has a number of specific rules such as structure
word rules.
●
L2 learners of English make spelling mistakes based in part on their L1 writ-
ing system, in part on lack of knowledge of the English spelling rules.
●
Are you confident about your punctuation?
●
What do you think punctuation is for?
Focusing questions
Thanks to Cambridge English, I collected 18,000 spelling mistakes made with
verbs from First Certificate of English (FCE) examination scripts from many lan-
guages. The most common type of mistake was letter doubling (both consonant and
vowel) with 35 per cent ‘speciallize’, followed by letter omission with 19 per cent
‘exlaimed’, using the wrong letter with 18 per cent ‘enjoiing’, and adding an extra
letter with 10 per cent ‘boreing’. Clearly, teaching could take these overall patterns
of spelling mistakes into account. Something more is needed than correction of
individual mistakes as and when they occur.

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While some teachers are aware of spelling and do try to correct individual errors,
the area of punctuation has been virtually ignored. Punctuation consists of the
use of additional marks as well as the letters of the alphabet, such as commas 
,
or full stops 
., known in American style as periods. Many writing systems have
similar punctuation marks, with slight variations in their form. Quotation marks,
for instance, vary between English 
“ “, Italian goosefeet 
« »
 and Swiss
goosefeet

» «
. Spanish uses inverted question marks  ¿  and exclamation
marks
 ¡  at the beginning of phrases. Chinese has a hollow full stop  ⴰ ,
Catalan a raised one 
  .
The most important English punctuation mark is literally invisible. Compare:
WillyoustillneedmewillyoustillfeedmewhenImsixtyfour?
with:
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?
Apart from punctuation, the difference is word spaces: modern English writing
separates words with a space, recognized as a character in computer jargon – look
at the word count results provided in Microsoft
®
Word to see this. Spaces are not
intrinsic to alphabetic writing. In Europe the use of spaces between words only
became widespread in the eighth century 
AD
. Sound-based writing systems do not
necessarily have word spaces, such as Vietnamese, or may use word spaces for dif-
ferent purposes, such as Thai. Character-based writing systems like Chinese and
Japanese do not have word spaces but put spaces between characters, which may
or may not correspond to words. Some have seen the invention of the word as cru-
cial to the ability to read.
Another little considered aspect of punctuation is the actual forms of letters.
Starting a sentence with a capital letter is one familiar use. In English, capitals are
used for proper names, 
Bill rather than bill, and for certain groups of words
like months 
January, and for content words in the titles rule seen in Box 5.3
on page 91. In German, capital letters are used for all nouns, a practice occasion-
ally found in seventeenth-century English. Underlining and italics are used for
questions of emphasis and for book titles in academic references. Underlining is
disliked by typographers and rarely found in books because it destroys the descen-
der of the letter below the line in letters like 
p, g, y and so makes it less legible:
I’m trying to pay the mortgage versus I’m trying to pay the mortgage.
The perpetual debate about punctuation is what it is for. Punctuation is used in
both the sound-based and the meaning-based routes. On the one hand, punctua-
tion has sometimes been seen as a guide to reading aloud. The eighteenth-century
rule for English was that a full stop 
. meant a full pause, a colon : was half
that, a semicolon 
; half that, and a comma , half that, rather like the relation-
ship between musical notes. While the colon and semicolon may now be rare, peo-
ple reading aloud may still use pauses of different lengths for the full stop and the
comma. The sentence final punctuation marks 
.?! correspond roughly to intona-
tion patterns in reading aloud – 
? to rising intonation, . to falling, ! to
extra movement or rise-fall intonation. Within the sentence, commas in lists may
show rising intonation: ‘I bought some apples, some pears, and some bananas’.
On the other hand, punctuation has also been seen as a guide to grammatical
structure. At one level, it separates different constructions, whether sentences
with full stops, or phrases with commas. But it also provides a structure for com-
plex written prose where large sentences can be constructed out of smaller sen-
tences by using colons and semicolons, to yield sentences such as those seen in
Box 5.8, or indeed the Dickens’ sentence in Box 5.1 on page 89. This is a unique
Acquiring and teaching a new writing system
96

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feature of written language, vaguely related, perhaps, to discourse intonation in
speech. Without the ability to put together such higher-level sentences, a writer
will come across as lightweight and over-simple.
Punctuation 97