Patterns of misspellings in L2 and L1 English: a view from the ETS Spelling Corpus

This paper presents a study of misspellings, based on annotated data from the ETS Spelling corpus. The corpus consists of 3000 essays written by examinees, native (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) of English, on the writing sections of GRE® and TOEFL® examinations. We find that the rate of misspellings decreases as writing proficiency (essay score) increases, both in TOEFL and in GRE. Severity of misspellings depends on writing proficiency and not on NS/NNS distinction. Word-length and word-frequency have strong influences on production of misspellings, showing patterns associated with proficiency. For word-frequency, there is also a clear effect of NS/NNS distinction