A linguistic study of spelling mistakes in the writing of class V to VII, students of Urdu medium schools in Aligarh

Abstract

The present thesis attempts to make a linguistic analysis of newlinespelling mistakes in the writing of class V-VII students of Urdu newlinemedium schools in Aligarh. This analysis is based upon the data newlinecollected from students of the classes referred to above. The whole work has been divided into seven chapters (7). Chapter one of my thesis deals with theoretical background of the present ork. It explains the notions of language teaching, error analysis with a view to providing a proper perspective to the present work. newlineLanguage teaching is a complex set of activities all aiming to language learning. A good language teaching theory always aims at meeting all requirements of learners in the best possible ways. newlineError analysis is the best tool for describing and explaining istakes made by students. It helps know the sources of difficulties of the learners. The chapter also outlines the main features of Urdu writing system, which consists of letters, connected forms and diacritical marks. Urdu has many irregularities in its spellings for a variety of reasons such as it has many homophonous letters and many words exhibit a mismatch between sound and spelling. In short, most of the speech sounds in Urdu are represented with more than one letter and vice versa. The essentials of spelling errors in Urdu writing are analyzed for such analysis is of great help to teachers in recognizing error patterns that keep recurring. Five kinds of spelling errors are found in the data viz, substitution, addition, deletion, permutation and splitting and merging of the word boundaries. Errors of substitution and addition form the bulk of total spelling errors (i.e.80%). The effect of sociolinguistic setting or background of learners is also treated here since in language learning social variables play a crucial role in determining the language quality and learning efficiency of children. A sub-section of the chapter deals with Research Procedures. Since all kinds of research require relevant data.