Comments on the title, abstract, and references

The title is clear yet it does not reflect what has been discussed in the paper; Saudi students' spelling problems. The abstract contained inessential information especially in the first four lines, as those lines could be moved to the literature review section. Besides, it was unclear which method did the author apply and how did he collect and analyze data. However, the last few lines clearly described the aim of the research and highlighted some of the article's themes. The references are somehow outdated, as there are plenty of current research papers that tackle this topic. On the other hand, the list was well organized and mistakes free.

Comments on introduction/background

The introduction delivered decent information about the importance of spelling and how it affects other skills. However, the research is not well-divided as there was no clear cut between the introduction, methodology, data analysis, and discussion. Consequently, this affected the text flow as the reader would be lost at some points while reading the text. The research question was not mentioned in the paper nor the purpose of the research. In the literature review (although this term was not used) some weaknesses were spotted such as:

1- The use of old references instead of new updated ones. 2- Repetition of the same concept using different terms: whole language approach and the traditional approach. These two terms mean that students learn words' spelling as a whole (one word at a time). Thus repeating them would give a hint that the researcher did not understand and, therefore, distinguish these two terms. 3- In the "Spelling difficulties encountered by Arab learners " part, the researcher provided well-structured information and connected what he presented in a deliberate fashion which made this part outstanding.

Comments on the Methodology

The most noticeable mistake in this research is that it did not discuss the methodology in detail. Thus the reader is left wondering how is this research going to be conducted?
In the last two pages, a brief discussion (ONE paragraph) that is related to methodology which the researcher called "small experiment". In that paragraph, he reported that twenty students were randomly selected and asked to spell down five words followed by an analysis of the students' mistakes. Now, this added information posed a dilemma whether this is a systematic review type of research or an experiment carried out to investigate the problems of spelling! Needless to say, that validity and reliability are not discussed and not presented which cast doubt on the "small" results that the author presented.

Comments on data & results

The results provided specific details regarding the data collected from the participants. Besides, the number and types of mistakes were clearly presented with examples. That being said, had the researcher used tables or graphs, it would have been easier to follow and read. As for the results, the researcher made a big claim that cannot be deducted from such research when he declared that " it can be said that most Saudi students seem to be poor in phonology knowledge in addition to their lack of the orthographic awareness." Therefore, this sentences should be removed.

Comments on discussion

In this section which has not been separated from the rest of the paper, the author presented the results of his experiment and jumped straight to conclude that these mistakes were due to poor phonological knowledge and lack of orthographic awareness. However mistakes in spelling are not simply due to the previous reasons the author stated, they are more than that such as: the nature of English itself and lack of interest in learning. The author suggested three techniques to teach students spelling, and all of them were cited from old references (1985 &1995). As for the first technique: it is time-consuming and impossible to carry out except in one-to-one courses. Whereas the third one emphasizes the importance of teaching frequent misspelled words yet did not instruct teachers how to conduct it. Last, limitations of the research and suggestion for further research were not included in the paper.