An Investigation of English Spelling Achievement among Second Level Saudi Students at King Khalid University

Most of the Saudi college students’ face problems and difficulties when they try to spell English words correctly to create a piece of writing. The main objective of this study was to examine the spelling achievement in English among college students’ at KKU whose first language is Arabic. The interviewees consisted of 25-Thirdyear students. The instrument of this research has been based on a dictation task. The results showed that: about 243 spelling errors have been found in the subjects’ responses to the spelling test. The most frequent errors were: transposition with the lowest ratio 3% of the total number of spelling errors, insertion with 17% of the total number of spelling errors, substitution errors with 29% of total errors and omission with the highest level of the total number of spelling errors, 54% of errors. The results showed that the most common spelling error made by the learners in this study was to omit one or more letters (vowels and consonants) and the second highest type was to replace one or more letters in the test item with one or more incorrect letters.