Surprisingly, the same Icelandic youth that spoke to my siblings and I in fluent English couldn’t spell. I was floored when after an hour chatting with one of them they couldn’t spell “frog”. Not because they should be able to spell in English, but because I couldn’t understand how someone could be so fluent in a language without being literate. Clearly it’s very possible.
You can be perfectly fluent in a language without being literate in any language; for a long time, that was the norm for even first languages, so obviously its possible.
And English, with its extremely complex (frequently irregular, but even where not strictly so still not simple) mapping between phonetics and pronunciation probably has bigger gap between spoken and written proficiency as a first language than languages with a more simply phonetic script.
Was it a case where they didn't know how to write it down, or did they have a problem with saying individual letters? The latter seems much more likely as different languages usually small differences in pronunciation of some letters.
Specifically I quizzed him on saying the letters. We were just stuck at a bus stop and having some fun. Not really a pencil and paper type of situation.
Surprisingly, the same Icelandic youth that spoke to my siblings and I in fluent English couldn’t spell. I was floored when after an hour chatting with one of them they couldn’t spell “frog”. Not because they should be able to spell in English, but because I couldn’t understand how someone could be so fluent in a language without being literate. Clearly it’s very possible.