Contribution of phonological, morphological and orthographic awareness to English word spelling: A comparison of EL1 and EFL models

The purpose of the present study was to examine the contribution of metalinguistic skills-as measured through orthographic awareness, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness-to the English spelling ability of Grade 8 Chinese students who study English as a foreign language (EFL group) and of third graders in the U.S. whose first language is English (EL1 group). The two groups were initially matched through calculating the Flesch-Kincaid reading level of Chinese EFL students' textbooks and then through propensity score matching, taking into consideration various predictors. Using multiple regression and dominance analysis, we compared the models of metalinguistic awareness that predict English word spelling between the two groups. We found that orthographic awareness and morphological awareness were uniquely related to spelling for the EL1 group, whereas morphological awareness, orthographic awareness and phonological awareness were uniquely related to spelling for the EFL group, after accounting for the effect of vocabulary. Further analysis of relative importance of the predictors showed that orthographic choice was the dominant predictor for the EL1 group and inflectional morpheme production was the dominant predictor for the EFL group. The importance of metalinguistic awareness in acquiring English spelling in both EL1 and EFL groups is discussed.