Saudi EFL Adult Learners’ Spelling Errors: Reasons and Remedial Strategies to Raise Their Writing Proficiency Level

This study aims to find out the most common spelling errors committed by the Saudi EFL learners, their plausible reasons and the successful remedial strategies. The study may help the EFL teachers in their task of enabling their learners to complete their writing essays and assignments without any spelling mistakes and errors. This is a purely qualitative study. Thirty male EFL teachers and fourteen female EFL teachers have participated in this research study by sharing their teaching observations and experiences and helping in categorization of learners’ errors and in finding reasons and remedies for the learners’ spelling errors. Moreover, in the light of the feedback provided by the teacher participants, the researcher analyzed 50 writing drafts of Level-4 male Saudi EFL learners and 50 Level-4 female Saudi EFL learners at Preparatory Year Programme at Qassim University. The study concludes that the Saudi EFL learners usually use interlingual and intralingual transfer strategies due to problems in phonemic differences, loan words; phonemic, orthographic, homophonous, morphological and compounding confusions; ignorance or overgeneralization of spelling rules, and the impact of social media. The study recommends a number of teaching techniques for their rectification.