The question ‘Should English spelling be simplified?’ has come under discussion again recently. In today’s post, English Language and Linguistics graduate, and English Language Assistant Natilly Macartney offers her opinion.
A potential reform of English spelling has recently become a hot topic in the news. Backing a change is the English Spelling Society. They want to simplify English spelling in an attempt to improve literacy rates around the world and save time and money in the classroom.
Is English spelling that difficult?
The English Spelling Society’s website argues that, “English spelling is probably the most irregular spelling system of all those based on the alphabetic system”. However, I am unconvinced that compared to other languages, the orthography of English is alarmingly difficult. Let’s consider the French language. Many of the language’s features make reading and writing in French an arduous task. For example, written final consonants are usually silent and inflectional endings for verbs in the third person plural are unpronounced in most tenses. For example, ‘ils jouent’ (they play) is actually realised as /il joo/.
I am concerned that it is the English language which has been targeted and criticised, and not the methods which are used to teach reading and spelling. It is important to acknowledge that reading and spelling in English are not impossible. Millions of people all over the world have mastered these skills.
How can we teach effective spelling and reading skills?
Good readers and spellers possess strong word attack skills. For some learners these skills need to be taught explicitly and repetitively via rules, in order to be mastered. So what rules can be taught to help identify regularities in English? Let’s look briefly at English vowels. From my experience of teaching, vowels are one of the main difficulties in early reading, and initially they should be taught in isolation. In English, vowels can be either long or short. In the classroom, this difference can be explained using more simplistic terms, ‘in a word a vowel can say either its name, or its sound’. For example, the letter ‘a’ can say its name /eɪ/, or its sound /æ/. Vowels normally say their name if they are in an open syllable or if they are next to or one consonant away from a ‘magic e’. For example, the ‘a’ in ‘mat’ says its sound, but the ‘a’ in ‘mate’ says its name because of the presence of an ‘e’.
In English, silent letters such as double consonants, and commonly ‘d’, are often within words to make vowels say their sound. For example, without a silent ‘d’, ’sledge’ would be pronounced as /sleege/. The effect of ‘e’ on the first vowel in ‘sledge’ is blocked by the letter ‘d’, because ‘magic e’ cannot jump over more than one consonant.
How can we help learners identify exceptions to the rules?
Learners can be prompted to recognise vowels in words. They can also be asked to think about the different ways they can make a vowel say the sound they want. Of course, there remain many words in written English which are exceptions to rules and cannot be decoded phonetically. As a result, these words must be learnt as sight words. In the classroom they can be identified as ‘unfair words’ and learners can rote learn them through lots of exposure and fun activities.
In the English classroom I try to promote an interest in the orthography of English. I encourage questions such as, ‘why is this word spelt this way?’ In my opinion, English is a beautifully written language which bears the scars of a rich lexical history. To simplify English spelling would be to lose this history.
Click here to read more by Tilly on her blog.