Letter-name spelling in Polish and English: Different languages, the same strategy (?)
Letter-name spelling in Polish and English: Different languages, the same strategy (?)

Summary/Abstract: Previous research on children’s invented spelling observed that children can use the name of a letter to code two successive phonemes in a word (e.g. CR ‘car’). This study presents some research results on Polish invented spelling and describes an investigation into the development of early literacy. Our aim is to characterize mistakes made by Polish children at the beginning of schooling and to compare the letter-name spelling strategy in Polish and in English. The results confirm that this strategy is widely used by Polish children. A comparison of two characteristic misspellings: Polish-speaking children’s (RBA ‘ryba’ – fish) and English speaking children’s (HLP ‘help’) shows that the ways of access to literacy (teaching the names of letters vs. phonological training)have a fundamental significance to pre-schoolers’ conception of grapheme-phoneme correspondences.

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