Copyright (c) 2025 Visión Antataura
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
It is widely believed that spelling is facing alarming difficulties among young students. Some blame it on the use of social media, where, incidentally, the Orthography of the Spanish Language allows the use (within them) of abbreviated spelling and the use of emojis. (RAE y ASALE, 2011). The objective of this research is to determine the most common errors made by first-year students at the Azuero Regional University Center in 2025, based on the fact that, in Panamanian Spanish, many phonemes (b, v; c, s, z; b, v; y, ll), among others, are pronounced the same way even though they are not spelled the same. This situation, which does not occur in Spain, generates confusion among young students, who, out of inertia, assume that if two phonemes are pronounced the same way, it is logical that their graphemes are spelled the same. There are commonly accepted ideas such as: "spelling enters through the eyes," which means that good reading skills are a fundamental element for achieving good spelling; also: "you learn to do by doing"; that is, you learn to write by writing, and, of course, you cannot ignore knowledge of the fundamental rules of spelling, which, when put into practice, contribute to achieving specific objectives on the subject.
