I published The Literacy File in 1997 myself as I was not satisfied with the royalties on offer from commercial publishers. It was joint winner of the United Kingdom Reading Association's Donald Moyle Award, but was soon swamped by the government's national literacy strategy, which attempted to replace the phonics of the national curriculum through the Dearing Review in 1995 with the ill-conceived "searchlights" system. This set the cause of reading teaching in the UK back twenty years. Its authors still think they were right, much as Clement Attlee considered that the British should have hung on longer in the Dardanelles in WW1.
This chapter is the key to the book, as it contains the analysis of the spelling system as I explain it to children with reading difficulties. It's the complete chapter, so makes a long posting. If you like it, the book is available from me at £15 including postage, cheque with order.
Chapter 2. The English Spelling System.
The best available estimates for regularity in English spelling put it at 75 –85%. This is enough to be useful, but the irregularities cause problems, particularly as many occur in common words. Anyone setting out to teach literacy in English needs to know the main patterns in regular and awkward parts of the language, and to be able to explain them. An approach that does not do this leaves the learner floundering at every irregular word. It is not enough to tell children to learn irregular words by heart, as they have nothing on which to base their learning.
Because children need to be able to trust what we say, we must take care not to say anything that we will later have to contradict. This maxim helps:
· We use what the letters tell us, but we don’t believe the letters tell us everything. Some things we have to know for ourselves.
Most children with learning difficulties have some knowledge of letters, but also some gaps, and few use information from letters and groups of letters confidently to work words out. The following simple framework allows us to present and reinforce all of the patterns in English spelling in a straightforward way that builds confidence and does not confuse.
What letters tell us
Sounds.
Sometimes we have a one sound for each letter, as in cat. Sometimes, the letters give us most of the sounds we need to read the word, but not all, as in catastrophe. We often have to make small adjustments in the way we use information on sounds (car, far, star are not quite like cat, fat, hat), but children do not generally find this a problem. In the longer term, though, we have to understand that letters can’t tell us how to pronounce longer words - this is one of the things we have to learn, and we do so by learning words in groups, with similar intonation. Catastrophe, therefore, comes with apostrophe.
Information.
Some letters do not give us a sound, but information about the sounds of other letters. There are not many of these, but a common example is the final e in words like mate, here, pike, note and cure. This information does not work all the time, but it works often enough to be very useful, and groups can be made of words where it doesn’t work (where, there). These will tend to re-inforce themselves. Learning that some letters behave in this way is one of the key hurdles in mastering the alphabetic system.
A later example of letters used to provide information is in the effect of e, i and y in changing the sounds of c and g. This can be a real sticking point for pupils who have had to work hard on the early stages of reading. Some examples follow:
centre city mercy
cell civilian cycle
cent circle bicycle
innocent cider cygnet
recent recipe
Cyprus
century
necessary
gem gin energy
general gipsy gyrate
generous Gillian
Egypt
gene vigil clergy
gestation edgy
digest
congestion
edge
This pattern is less consistent with g, where some common words - give, get, girl - do not use it. Both of these series of information letters need a good bout of sustained practice for many children, reinforced by competitive games.Finally, letters are sometimes used as a “wall”, specifically to prevent information being transferred from one letter to another. The two words page and plague show this effect - the u stops the e from softening the g, though in this case the long a sound is retained. In some words, doubling a consonant has a very similar effect - as in slapping and sloping. The description of letters as a wall was first made by Dr Beve Hornsby.
Combinations.
Because we have so many words and so few letters, letters have to work together. Some combinations are very simple, such as ship, as the two letters might be expected to produced a sound like this. Others, like patient, are more difficult, as the sound produced by the combination is much farther removed from that of the letters pronounced separately. These combinations can be introduced once a child has made some progress in reading.
Vowel combinations create problems of their own. Vowels represent voice sounds, and the problem is that we have twenty recognised vowel sounds in English speech, and only seven letters with which to write them:
a e i o u
y w
Update, 2008. I have found that presenting vowels in this way, and explaining the origin of the word vowel in the French word for voice, is central to having children understand that vowels are first of all voice sounds, and that we use letters to represent them. Voice sounds are the most difficult features of speech to write down, and the complexity of English vowels is probably the hardest single feature in the spelling system.
These letters have to work overtime in the system, and even then have too much to do to be perfectly consistent. Children’s knowledge and understanding of vowels develops more slowly than that of consonants, and vowels consistently account for a disproportionate number of spelling mistakes. We cannot return to the position of early alphabetic scripts, in which vowels were simply omitted, and so we need to teach children to expect vowels to wobble at times, and to see the main ways this happens. This is not effectively done simply by listing all of the possibilities of a combination, but by beginning with the most frequent, and so cutting the awkward squad down to size. This example uses the ea combination:
awkward
bear
pear
tear
steak
head sea
dead tea
bead tease
instead please
sound name (both of the first vowel in the combination)
Once pupils can see that there is some sense to the most common alternatives, and can use the groups of words to reinforce each other, much of the terror is removed. Life would certainly be simpler if we hadnly one way of representing each vowel sound, but it is not impossible as things are, provided that we do not raise false expectations. The thinking required to see and use patterns is more flexible and less strictly logical than that required to apply rules. Some reading difficulties, paradoxically enough, are caused by children trying to think too logically, as if there were one right way to proceed, and these children, who are often among the most intelligent, need to be helped to adjust their thinking so as to make use of logic where it helps, and to use their understanding of the fourth and final category where logic fails.
History.
Following the Norman conquest in 1066, the Germanic form of English spoken by the Anglo-Saxons became infused with French words. This French connection has been an active force ever since, and is the source of a high proportion of the irregularities in English spelling. For example, table makes perfect phonetic sense when in French, as the l clearly comes before the e. It is a French word, with a French spelling, and once this is realised, the pattern can be used to read and spell many more such words - able, cable, disable, enable, stable. Allow the a to keep its shorter French form and you have more words, including capable and constable. French spelling has been modified over the years, particularly in the great national French spelling reforms in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, but its contribution to the difficulty of English spelling is undeniable.
Take, for example, manger. Most weak readers, particularly boys, read this as manager. In French the word means “to eat”, or sometimes “food” (le manger). In English, it is a holder for an animal’s food. The connection with the original meaning is clear, but the spelling and the pronunciation have changed. Once the pattern is seen, danger, stranger, ranger, Grange, arrange, strange become straightforward.
How far these issues are explored will depend on the needs of the pupils, but there is a further potential payoff for older pupils, in that many of the words which have come into English from French are easy to turn back into French words. This is not generally exploited by linguists because there are times when the approach does not work, with potentially embarrassing results. Nevertheless, Hubert Seguin, of theUniversity of Ottawa, found in a survey of two non-specialist French-English dictionaries, including the Collins-Robert, 6,450 words with identical spellings and a further 16,710 in which the differences were minimal. These words constituted roughly 30% of the total entries in the dictionaries. His lists included the following:
-age: bandage, image, page, message, usage, voltage, passage
-ance: chance, balance, finance, alliance, tolerance, ambulance,
-ence: confidence, evidence, intelligence, providence, licence
-tion: nation, action, attention, adaptation, administration
-al: animal, normal, signal, cardinal, final, original, national
-ial: racial, social, special, commercial, colonial, initial
-et: alphabet, buffet, budget, cricket, ticket, violet, secret
-ect: intellect, direct, correct, aspect, respect, suspect
-in: Latin, cousin, assassin, bulletin, florin, mandarin
-ain: gain, grain, refrain, train, quatrain, certain, vain
-ent: accent, recent, innocent, precedent, incident, president
-ant: vacant, elegant, elephant, extravagant, descendant
-ive: offensive, initiative, tentative, co-operative, intensive
-ine: discipline, machine, morphine, Vaseline, routine, sardine
-ible: possible, compatible, sensible, invisible, terrible.
The use of this information in teaching modern languages is beyond the scope of this publication, but the French connection clearly provides the means of adding an additional and effective dimension to children’s thinking about words. Properly presented, they find it interesting, and it is also the truth. Lessons on these patterns can be particularly effective in Y6/P7, as there is the incentive of a contribution to the French which will begin in the next year.
The demon ...ough.
According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language, these spellings were regularised by printers towards the end of the seventeenth century. They are the most irregular and variable in their sound correspondence in the language, but can be cut down to size provided that the letter combination is thoroughly memorised, by fair means or foul - saying it over and over again, and then writing it several times, covering each version before beginning the next, is usually effective. Next, the irregularities themselves can be grouped together, leaving only through to be taught on its own, normally with some examples showing it in context. ...augh can be left until it arises in reading or writing, at which point it can be given similar treatment. The grouping here is the same as that in the sample lesson in Chapter 8. Some teachers find it helps children to remember the most awkward words if they draw a picture, preferably a funny picture, with which to associate them.
ought thorough plough
bought borough bough
thought
Slough
fought
brought rough though
(optional) tough dough
sought enough although
wrought trough
cough
No through road
I’m through with this
He went straight through a red light.
These aspects of historical development have been singled out because they cause most trouble, but students who wish to study the problem in more depth will find Professor David Crystal’s account a helpful starting point. He notes that even in Anglo-Saxon England an alphabet of 27 symbols had to cope with 40 sound units (phonemes) - compare this with our modern alphabet of 26 letters and 44 accepted sound units - so that combinations of letters were essential right from the earliest language that can be called English.
The other most significant change, and one which is less immediately accessible to modern students, is the “great vowel shift” of the 15th century, in which the pronunciation of many common words changed, and some letters which had previously been pronounced, such as the k in knight, became silent. Investigations of all of these aspects can make interesting tasks for pupils - Vikings are generally very popular - and contribute to their understanding of the nature of the system they are learning to use.
The sequence of sounds, information, combinations and history is consistent with the linguistic evidence, but simple enough for children to understand and use. As sounds come first, it is also quite compatible with the systematic introduction to the alphabet and its sounds that is the main strength of phonics programmes. I have presented it in demonstration lessons in primary and secondary schools and in further and higher education, varying the amount presented in a single session to the needs and capacities of the pupils. Relegating the really awkward historical leftovers to the end, explaining them and then using a patterns approach to draw their sting seems to be a particular strength of the approach, and readily understood by children, who have previous experience of adult foibles.
Phonics’ Second Wind.
As pupils develop their reading in the later stages of the primary school and in the secondary school, they encounter an increasing number of complex words, often of Latin or Greek origin, in which phonic regularity is often more consistent than it is in some of the simpler words they learn in the early stages. These words often contain shades of meaning which make them particularly difficult to guess from context, but benefit from consistency in prefixes and suffixes which makes a phonic approach very effective in learning them.
For this reason, phonic work should be part of the teaching of all pupils as they progress through junior school, but should be adapted to meet the needs of more advanced readers through the study of patterns of stress and intonation which have to be learned in order to use the information provided by the letters effectively. Pupils, for example, can be encouraged to collect words, similar to those they are learning, which have their stress on the first, second or third syllables, and to see that these are alternative patterns which they can use while trying to read new words.
Here again, the principle of using what letters tell us without believing that they tell us everything, will help the pupil to use patterns and regularity without relying on them excessively. Encouraging pupils to build up their own collections - supplying words to help, of course - helps them to perceive patterns for themselves and hence understand them.
