Children’s metacognitive awareness and self-correction of their own spelling mistakes

This paper examines how children identify and correct spelling errors in their own writing. Our research focused on two questions: (a) how accurate primary school children are in their metacognitive monitoring of their own writing of a dictated text, and (b) whether they are able to translate their spelling performance monitoring into regulatory behaviour such that they revise and correct detected spelling errors. A total of 318 German-speaking primary school children wrote a continuous text that was dictated to them by an instructor in their language of instruction (German). In order to differentiate between the processes of monitoring and control, children were first instructed to underline words they were unsure about (Review Phase). After this initial monitoring process, children were told that they could change their initial spellings (Revise Phase). Our results demonstrate that the primary school children were accurate in identifying their correctly spelled words (high specificity), whereas their error detection rate was poor (low sensitivity). Furthermore, only about 24% of the words selected in the Review Phase were then actually changed in the Revise Phase. When children did revise the spelling of a word, they were more likely to correct an initial spelling mistake than change a correct spelling. Children’s difficulties in identifying and correcting their own spelling mistakes seem to be related to their low sensitivity to spelling errors (spelling awareness deficit) and their reluctance or inability to correct misspelled words (implementation or knowledge deficit).