In recent years, Dutch spelling instruction in Flemish and Dutch secondary education (SE) as well as tertiary education (TE) has been the subject of much debate. Research into the spelling knowledge of students in SE (n= 359) suggests that their skills fall short of the final attainment targets. Additional research now tries to uncover the reasons behind this trend, not only by focusing on student cognition but also on teacher cognition as an 'understudied' aspect of language teaching. With this study, we want to fill this void by assessing what teachers think, know and believe regarding specific aspects of spelling.
More specifically, we will compare the perception of spelling errors by (practising) teachers in SE (n= 274) versus a control group (n= 89). In doing so, we will focus on Flemish (n= 138) and Dutch teachers (n= 136) and a control group of Flemish (n= 48) and Dutch (n= 41) ` ordinary language users'. Additionally, we draw a distinction between (L1 and L2) language teachers (n= 123) and non-language teachers (n= 151). The study is two-pronged: it contains (1) an evaluation of 10 rule-related (e.g. dt) and memory-related (e.g. ei/ij) errors (rated on a Likert-scale 1-100) and (2) an evaluation of their attitude tested by 10 statements (rated on a Likert-scale 1-5). These statements focus on the perception of spelling errors. We will assess whether there are any statistically significant discrepancies in the perception of spelling errors between the two groups, and will relate those results to the relevant literature.
The main outcome of this study is that there is a significant Pearson correlation (p= 0.000) between the above-mentioned questions (1) and (2). While we dispel the myth that teachers are much stricter and more critical than non-teachers when it comes to spelling errors, our research has shown that language teachers are more exacting than non-language teachers, particularly when they teach the mother tongue
