The Spelling Thief

Which words do learners most commonly misspell in Cambridge exams? According to the Cambridge Learners' Corpus, these:

Accommodation
Advertisement
Beautiful
Because
Beginning
Believe
Bicycle
Comfortable
Communicate
Convenient
Embarrassing
Especially
Received
Sincerely
Which


There lots of ways to help prevent learners losing marks from misspellings such as these in Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners, my award-winning book. 

Johanna

5 comments:

  1. Swan PondThursday, October 25, 2012

    Words starting a-e are well represented aren't they?

    Looking at this list you'd have to think knowing about suffixes must help - ly added to the baseword is there twice, and others have standard suffixes, advertisement.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Swan PondSunday, November 04, 2012

    Johanna, did this list surprise you? A lot of native speakers will be able to spell most of these by age of 12 years.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JohannaSunday, November 04, 2012

    Actually, no, the list didn't surprise me at all. They all look very familiar (I mean the misspellings would). Yes, a lot of native speakers can spell these by 12, but don't you think there are a significant number who can't? Especially words like accommodation and embarrassing?
    Johanna

    ReplyDelete
  4. Swan PondThursday, November 15, 2012

    Stop Press,

    Here is some help for explaining the word accommodation. http://blog.inkyfool.com/2012/11/commodities-accommodation-and-commodes.html
    I asked Mark Forsyth about this one, in the Dear Dogberry section of his blog and lo and behold he covered it! Or maybe he was going to do it anyway. Whatever, for the classroom I could make a set of pics explaining some of these links. My view is the more kids know about words the more they are likely to remember them

    Megan

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  5. boyetmeSunday, May 05, 2013

    I compiled a list of 200 Most Commonly Misspelled Words in my blog.
    Link is http://boyetme.blogspot.com/2013/05/200-most-commonly-misspelled-words.html.
    I also made a 20-item test out of it, and surprisingly, no one has ever gotten a perfect score.
    The words on my list are really common words but as common as they are, people tend to overlook their spellings. The link to the test is on my blog as well.
    Please check them out!

    You have a very nice blog. ^_^

    ReplyDelete

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