It may be difficult to gain insights into the reasons why Thai students produce spellingmistakes without understanding the Thai writing system. The writing system is defined byCoulmas (1999, p. 560) as ‘a set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of languagein a systematic way’. Thai is a sound-based written system. The sound-based writing linksletters as written symbols or graphemes to sounds or phonemes (Cook, 2004). For example,<ก> in Thai corresponds to the phoneme /k/or the grapheme in English. Thai scripts areoriginally Indic. Thai writing is written from left to right without spacing between words.Spaces are implemented only to separate sentences and phrases. The Thai orthography 3consists of consonants and vowels. There are 44 consonant symbols with 21 phonemes, forinstance, two consonant symbols <ล, ฬ> in Thai are equivalent to the grapheme whichcorresponds to the phoneme /l/ in English, and there are 19 vowel symbols and 21 core vowelphonemes; for example, the Thai vowel ก /ku/ (Diller, 1996, p. 458). These consonantsprovide different sounds depending on their initial or final positions. Thai can be mappedbetween graphemes and phonemes, but there are multi-graphemes that correspond tophonemes, such as /tςh/, /kh/, /ph/, etc. Thai consonant letters are written in a linear order, butvowels can be put in any places: preceding, following, above, or below a consonant letter.Thai is a tonal language consisting of five tonal marks which result in different tones andmeanings of syllables and words (Winskel and Iemwanthong, 2009). Cook (2004) explainsthat the phonological route which converts letters to phonemes allows spellers to spell unseenor unknown words. Most sounds of Thai alphabetic symbols correspond to English letters andphonemes, so Thai students can spell words they have not seen or learned. Letter and soundcorrespondence also fosters students to memorize spelling. Therefore, it can be noted thatcorrespondence between Thai graphemes and English phonemes can aid Thai students to copewith English spelling.
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