October 2023
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The following chapter aims to explore in an orthographic system like French, if spelling is related concurrently to written composition within specific grade levels (Grade 3, Grade 6, or Grade 4) and longitudinally across grade levels (Grade 3 and Grade 6 or Grade 3 and Grade 4). French spelling is interesting because it includes phonographic irregularities (i.e., inconsistencies), lexical difficulties, and morphological silent markers (e.g., plural noun, adjective, and verb agreement). Pupils were asked in every grade to compose narrative texts either from verbal instructions (Study 1) or from strips (Study 2). Text length, text quality, and three categories of spelling errors were coded and analyzed. Two important results emerged: First, significant concurrent and longitudinal relationships were observed. Both text characteristics (i.e., length and quality) and total spelling errors were significantly correlated longitudinally across grade levels in the two studies. Second, regression analyses provided evidence that the more spelling errors the texts contained, the texts were shorter and rated of lower quality. Further analyzes showed that the errors with the most weight were the lexical errors. This result was unexpected insofar as national assessments in France have reported evidence that morphological errors are the most frequent and the most troublesome in students’ written compositions. Future research should continue to investigate the concurrent and longitudinal relationships of spelling and written composition in orthographies for different languages as well as the instructional applications of these differences.