I am italian and I can say the same thing for italian students: who can't spell properly is laughed at. However italian is a much easier language to be written out, because of its close phoneme-syllable connnection. Nevertheless, when I approached the English language, I did it by writing and listening to it in parallel, so I could notice all the incoherences of it (how do you pronounce "tear"? How do you write down a word sounding as "hare"? "Hair" can do as well... and I could go on). I think that for the english mother tongue person is harder to get acquaintance of the written form of a word because he or she has only heard it for many years without seeing it written . By the way, a welsh friend of mine once asked me --an italian-- if he should have written "referring" or "refering"...