Making Sense of the English Spelling System

1. Words’ Language of Origin & History of Use Can Explain Their Spelling

“The many layers of the English language do make it harder to learn to spell, but they also provide a rich vocabulary: The English language has roughly double the number of words of seemingly comparable languages like German, Spanish, and French.”

2. Words’ Meaning & Part of Speech can Determine Their Spelling

“Meaning trumps pronunciation in the spelling of hundreds of English words.”

3. Speech sounds are spelled with single letters and/or combinations of up to four letters.

“In English, we have just 26 letters to work with—but we have about 40 phonemes (sounds) and more than 250 graphemes (ways to spell those sounds).”

4. The spelling of a given sounds can vary according to its position within a word.

“Not all consonant or vowel spellings are that complex, but the choice of grapheme for a given speech sound is often determined by the speech sound that precedes or follows it.”

5. The spellings of some sounds are governed by established conventions of letter sequences & patterns.

“When dictionaries were first written and disseminated, rules for spelling had to be standardized. Scholars like Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster worked to accommodate the norms of the day and give the language more regularity.”

*quotes taken from pages 15-20 of American Educator