1. SPELLING ACQUISITION IN POLISH LANGUAGE
Elżbieta Awramiuk
University of Białystok, Poland

2. FIRST…
…A SHORT COURSE OF POLISH LANGUAGE

3. BASIC UNIT OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE
Dziecko czyta książkę i ogląda obrazki.
[The child reads a book and looks at the pictures]
Words may also occur as single morphemes
the word – the basic unit
Morphems
obraz-k-i
Words consist of significant and grammatical morphemes
root
word-formative
inflectional

4. POLISH – AN ALPHABETIC SYSTEM
Polish phonological system: about 40 phonemes; consonants: 75%
Polish alphabet: 32 letters (44 graphemes)
a ą b c ć d e ę f g h i j k l ł m n ń o ó p r s ś t u w y z ż ź

5. Relations between phonemes and graphemes
one letter – one phoneme: a-/a/, k-/k/
two or three letters – one phoneme: cz-/č/
one letter – two phonemes: b-/b/, /p/
one phoneme – represented by different letters: /u/-u, ó; /ž/-ż, rz; /h/-h, ch

6. There are words in Polish in which each letter corresponds to one sound, but in most cases there are significant qualitative and quantitative differences between the pronunciation of a word and its orthographic version.

7. Spelling vs. reading
Spelling is more difficult than reading because phoneme-grapheme relations are more inconsistent than grapheme-phoneme relations.

8. Teaching reading and writing in Poland
“O” grade:
6 year-old children
preschool stage/ prewriting
children learn to recognize basic letters
first grade:
7 year-old children
children begin to learn how to write

9. Teaching methods in Poland
Children begin from phonological training.
They are familiarized with the phonetic value of each letter during an auditory analysis.
The auditory analysis consists in pronouncing isolated sounds, which in the case of consonants can lead to isolation of the vocal element [y]: dom [dy] – [o] – [my].
The alphabet teaching (i.e. letter names) occurs relatively late in school curricula (second grade).

10. letter-name spelling IN ENGLISH
children use the phonetic strategy
they have many problems with phonological segmentation
syllables are represented by single graphemes
children write a letter to represent the sounds of the letter’s name:
help as HLP
they relate the phonetic value of L to the sound form of the letter name

11. IN POLISH MOTL motyl ‘butterfly’ DM dym ‘smoke’ WHY?
* Polish children are not taught letter names, but they begin to learn how to read from phonological training...

12. QUESTION
Do children starting to write in Polish and English omit the vowel letters for the same reason?

13. Experiment
The participants: 60 children from three separate 0 grade classes.
Task: writing 12 words, which were characterized by a simple structure and a consistent relation between a grapheme and phoneme.
a movable alphabet.
The words – 3 groups:
group I: words that contained a sequence corresponding to the name of the letter (e.g. deska ‘board’ contains the name of the letter D [de]),
group II: words containing the sequence Cy (e.g. lody ‘ice-cream’ contains the sequence [dy])
group III – with neutral phonological context (e.g. sequence [do] for the letter D in the word dom ‘house’).

14. If children equated the name of the letter with its phonetic value, then the words from the first group would be spelled without the vowels.
If there were other reasons for omitted letters (e.g. weak visual memory), the number of omissions should not differ between groups.
A greater number of misspellings in group II would prove that the problems with phonological segmentation are the result of the teaching method.

15. RESULTS

16. DISCUSSION
The reason that Polish children omit vowel letters is due to problems with phonological segmentation, especially in the Cy sequence. This is a result of teaching methods used in Poland.
When a Polish child asks the teacher: What letter is this? The answer is: [dy] and [my], and not de and em. Letter recognition is an introduction to acquisition of writing and reading skills, and for a Polish child the first letter (first, but not officially first) names are [dy] or [my].

17. DISCUSSION
The surprisingly large number of omissions occurred in sequences corresponding to the letter names. This means that, since the alphabet teaching occurs relatively late in school curricula (second grade), children may acquire the letter names earlier through informal learning (at home) and informal instruction at school (teachers – often unwittingly – use the letter names).

18. Specific spelling errors in English and Polish
DM dym ‘smoke’
the the sound value of the syllable [dy] does not correspond to the letter name
WR war
sound value of the syllable [ar] corresponds to the letter name
children write down the letter keeping in mind the (first) letter name

19. CONCLUSION
The method (alphabet learning vs. phonological training) of introducing children into the essence of writing is of fundamental importance for child's initial notions about grapheme-phoneme relations.